


False Dichotomy

by nsmorig



Series: So Says The Bullet: [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Asajj Ventress Experiences An Emotion (Oh No), Body Horror, Canon-Typical Systematic Dehumanisation of Clones, Complicated Relationships, Dark Humor, Dooku's Total Disregard of the Rule of Two, Force Shenanigans (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive CC-2224 | Cody, Force-Sensitive Clone Troopers (Star Wars), Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Lists, Manipulation, Mentioned/Off Screen Torture, Monsters, Moral confusion, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Not Sith-Friendly I Know How The Tags Look, Quinlan Vos: Superspy, Romanticisation of Paperwork, Sith Alchemy (Star Wars), Sith Code: What Does It Mean?, Sith Cody, The Dark Side of the Force (Star Wars), What Even Is The Dark Side Anyway?, Wordcount: 30.000-50.000, Worldbuilding, cody needs a break
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:48:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 44,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29026728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nsmorig/pseuds/nsmorig
Summary: Since a disastrous training exercise as a cadet, Cody's been hiding his connection to the Force, and he's pretty happy with the arrangement so far. He's a clone, and clones don't get to be Jedi. But he's just been captured by the Separatists, his secret's proving impossible to keep, and he's being drawn into plans he doesn't understand; he may never be a Jedi, but he's going to have to make a choice about what hewillbe.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & Asajj Ventress, CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody & Other Clones, CC-2224 | Cody & Quinlan Vos
Series: So Says The Bullet: [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2171682
Comments: 101
Kudos: 78





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to talk a little more about the warning tags, just in case:
> 
> Non-consensual body modification: This is pretty central to the fic. I'll mark the chapter in which it happens in the chapter's note, but after that it is referenced regularly, so it's skippable but not entirely avoidable. If medical stuff or what happened to Echo is a squick, avoid.
> 
> Body horror: directly related to the above. Again, pretty central; I wouldn't say it's avoidable.
> 
> Off-screen torture: it is mentioned but not in any way described. It is _not_ presented as an effective method of getting co-operation or information, because it isn't.
> 
> Manipulation: this is fundamentally a story about a character who does not wish to become a Sith becoming one. I would say canon-typical levels of Sith manipulating and lying to their apprentices, possibly less.
> 
> Graphic depictions of violence: Ventress is in it. Again, I would call this canon-typical.
> 
> Canon-typical dehumanisation of clones: referenced throughout and presented as a very bad thing. Not avoidable.
> 
> There is no romance in this fic. There may be romance in the sequel, which I have mostly planned. This fic is written through to chapter nine of eleven currently, and I plan on posting a chapter once or twice a week, as writing and editing permit.
> 
> I'd really like to thank Cassian ([Nyelung](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NyeLung/pseuds/NyeLung)) for being a fantastic test reader throughout. She's been wonderful to bounce ideas off and make incoherent noises about Cody to, and this fic wouldn't be in the same shape without her.
> 
> Chapter 1 notes:
> 
> I saw Cody 'Mr. Radio Antenna' and immediately projected my own fascination with communications technology onto him. Man's wifi-enabled. He's the kind of nerd that would build a ham radio tower in his back garden. I will not be taking constructive criticism on this headcanon.

The base is under siege, and Hevy is trying to get the front screen off a mining charge detonator, like he spends all his off-shift time doing anyway. He's discovered a whole new way for things to feel wrong. The sparking adrenaline is flickering and dying, like a wick with water damage; the training sims never lasted long enough for the battle-rush to fade.

He'd thought it would be different; he just feels sick. It would be nice to be able to regret his flippancy, but he just doesn't have the time to spare.

The cover clicks, and he shoves the chisel edge of the screwdriver under the edge fast enough that the anti-tamper field fritzes against his fingertips in a burst of light. He blinks away the blue afterimage, but he can't see any loose connections, no missing solder, no frayed wire or pooled coolant. Nothing he can fix.

Detonator units don't get the kind of regular testing that the rest of the GAR gear is meant to get. How could you?

It's the year 7955, and the galaxy runs on micro-circuitry, the holodisc, and the q-processor, but some things never change. To induce current at a distance, you need to have something to induce it in, and the resonator chip is cracked in the middle.

"This," he says, "Might take a minute to fix."

The captain turns around, still loading charges into the clip. Hevy twitches; his body wants to stand to attention, sitting cross-legged and hunched over the detonator. His borrowed pistol jabs him in the small of the back.

"Can you sort it with time to get out, do you think?"

"Yes," he says, and wishes he had his helmet on to hide behind. It's so much easier to lie, that way. "Yeah, it's just the EM radio relay."

The commander's head comes up across the room.

"Good man. We'll meet you outside." The captain nods with a familiar kind of determination, as though he can make it true by being firm enough with the universe. Or maybe that's wishful thinking on Hevy's part.

"No," the commander says. The _Marshall_ Commander, and isn't that a trip, in the gold paint he's seen over and over on the training holos, like something from a childhood story. He'd walked in and just called himself Cody, like they didn't know who he was. "No, I'll do it. Get moving."

"Commander, I—"

"Privilege of rank, kid." If a brick wall developed vocal cords, it would sound like that. "It's just a radio relay."

Hevy doesn't want to die. He doesn't want to die on this barren moon, but, he realises, he also doesn't want to die in a ten-day in front of a tribunal, charged with allowing the invasion of Kamino by arguing with a superior officer in a pointless waste of the only time they've got.

He looks to the captain, caught on the ledge with a long fall behind and a long fall ahead. The captain nods, and the relief is... Awful.

(The GAR regulations say that the ranking officers get into the lifepods first. The stories in Mando'a they've inherited in sideways, stealing ways say that the commanding officer gets off the plummeting ship last.)

* * *

Cody runs full-tilt through the tunnel, but every few metres it narrows with jutting rock formations and supply ports, so the sprint is really more a scramble. He clutches his pauldron, the plastoid twisted where he'd scavenged for parts. The rough edges bite into his gauntlets.

Light! The indigo light of twilight in the distance. He ducks his way through the access shaft and bursts into the open sky like a deep-sea diver out of air.

He can get himself issued a new helmet. The antenna on his pauldron clicks as it extends.

He takes a deep breath—the atmosphere is thin, but he doesn't care—and turns, trying to hear over the sound of his blood rushing. The tunnel goes too deep, though, and even the echoing of droids marching won't make it down.

All right. He closes his eyes and listens to nothing at all. Seconds pass, one after another, rushing into the present. The timing is crucial.

Now?

Now.

Every trooper in the system receives the same signal, a meaningless blat of low-frequency q-coded electromagnetic radiation. But his helmet is closest, so it catches first; there's no hailing code and no encryption, so the secondary filtering doesn't kick in; the receptor is clumsily tuned as close as he can get it with a cheap military-standard communicator unit meant for adjustment via terminal rather than the rookie's dropped screwdriver.

The signal on the receiver, clumsily jammed into the detonator, comes alive. The charge moves. The world goes red, then blue.

* * *

He doesn't groan into the stone as he comes to, or at least he thinks he doesn't; the ringing in his ears is too loud to tell.

Where are his men? Where is his blaster? He opens one eye tentatively on the side of his head not adhered to the rock. Several facts come to his attention as that first sign of life wakes up the rest of his brain.

The first is that the armour along his back has outright melted, which is deeply, deeply unpleasant. It says something about his life that the nerve-numb hot prickling is a sensation he recognises.

The second is not new. Everything hurts, and the realisation is familiar, like rations or the standard cut-out barracks on troop carrier ships, with the bunk that always squeaks.

The third is that he is surrounded by droids, chattering in their awful high-pitched way, in the absence of orders reverting to that most common military manoeuvre, Standing Around Doing Fuck All. That, also, is familiar, but usually he is on his feet, usually he has his blaster, and usually he has the General at his back, bright and warm and safe.

_Where_ is his blaster? His head aches too much to think straight.

One of the rookies has it, he thinks. Stupid decision on his part, to lend it out. He obviously needs it more.

The moonbase is pretty much the only thing on this rock, and his General and Skywalker should still be in orbit, unless he's spent more time unconscious than he thought. It's not safe, it's _never_ safe, but at least it's safer than trying this on the Negotiator.

He settles the back of his brain, reasons blearily that if the droids were going to shoot him they'd have done it already, and reaches out. His mind slips over the crags and valleys of the surface, hums through the metal of the base; it's not seeing, precisely, but it's almost like it. He'd never be able to explain to a blind person how it feels to see, and he'd never be able to explain to another _vod_ how it feels to see Rex in the distance, and the other lights around him.

They're not all alive, but no more of them are dead than the last time he saw them, and sometimes that's all you can hope for. He holds himself on alert in some strange, metaphysical way, waiting for the brush of someone who can recognise what he's doing, ready to curl back in on himself like an insect in a shell and hide, but there's no answer, and like every time, it's a relief.

Then he closes the door again, coils up in the secret, silent place where no-one can see him, alone.

Still a secret. Still safe. Except for the droids.

He will, he supposes, just have to stand and fight. Joy.

One droid makes a clicking whistle. "Do we take prisoners?" it asks, and Cody almost laughs. No, they never have. Even when it would be strategic. They just kill when they're told to.

* * *

Cody is learning many fascinating things about Separatist tactics. For instance, they take prisoners now. 

He doesn't regret what he did. He'd told the rookies he was in charge; when you take that power over others, in any form at all, as _ori'vod_ or commanding officer or just the man in the front of the marching party, you take their lives into your own and ahead of your own. It's not in the _resol'nare,_ or it only is if you squint, but... He thinks it should be.

From the outside, these ships look bright, the broad latticed windows glowing white-green in the dark of space, but those spanning windows let all the light _out._ From the inside, it's only the arc of space and the glitter and shift of the equipment and the droids.

He hates the Seppie battle-droids. But usually he does so in a much more detached sort of way than some of the brothers; he's never had the impulse to collect their fingers and wear them as a necklace, for example. And there are some upsides to droids. They don't go in for malice. They'll kill and steal and torture and burn crops and temples, but they won't do it for fun. They don't get their kicks roughing up prisoners.

They do as they're ordered, and no more. They don't want anything. They don't hate anything. Grievous, unfortunately, understands this, and that's one of the reasons he's such a pain to fight.

They'd peeled him off the ground and hit him with some kind of sedative, the kind that they never usually carry; that means this was premeditated, not just a last-ditch attempt to salvage something from Rishi moon. They came intending to take troopers. Today maybe he can hate them up close and personal.

Now he's a little loopy from the fading drugs and also from trying to headbutt a tactics droid, and all of him aches, and he's being dragged into the command centre first instead of a cell, which just... Doesn't make any sense.

"Is there any _good_ news, General, or has this little venture been entirely a waste of my resources?"

Cody huffs a breath, smiling vaguely in satisfaction. Waste of resources, his ass; his squad had kicked that particular tactical manoeuvre all the way back to Coruscant. Well, apart from the part where he's currently alone and unarmed on the Malevolence, but you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, or so he's heard. He isn't certain what an omelette is.

What a stupid thing to name your ship.

Grievous gesticulates to the hologram as he tries to explain his failure, and Cody jerks forward as the sudden impulse to kick the unprotected metal spine breaks through the drug. The metal fingers clamped around his arms tighten, and he's pulled back and up, until his feet hang in the air; he wriggles despite the strain in his shoulders, and settles for kicking the droid on his right in the shins with a snarl. He may as well make this as inconvenient for the bastards as he possibly can before he dies.

He may have broken a toe.

"We were not able to take any subjects directly from Kamino, but we have captured one clone, fleeing the moon-base; we suspect it may have been attempting to take advantage of the confusion in Republic troops to desert, as the tracking technology in its armour was destroyed."

"Show me."

Cody is hauled in front of the hologram; he tries to spit, but his mouth is dry and cotton-filled.

"What are your rank and duties, clone?"

Why is Dooku _talking_ to him? Is this some kind of bad dream? He says nothing, and curls his lip. Can't they just read it off his uniform?

But—his helmet was destroyed, his pauldron and shoulder plate torn up and left on the surface of the moon, and he's not wearing the kama. He's about as anonymous and nondescript as a clone can get. For the first time, he's glad of it.

The silence stretches; he suppresses the urge to laugh. Droids might not slap him for it, but Greivous certainly would.

"It may have been in Skywalker's legion," Greivous says, clearly also unclear on what, exactly, Dooku wants to know this for.

Cody eyes him sideways. Is he... Colourblind?

But this is a good thing. He's proud of his own stubbornness, but he doesn't hold delusions of how long he'd last under torture if they knew the scope of what he knows.

More importantly, though, Dooku is a liar and a cheat and a traitor, and he wouldn't hesitate to bait a trap with Cody. The General would know that, and he... Obi-wan would walk into the trap, for Cody.

He knows this, somewhere in his stomach, solid like lead shot and about as poisonous.

He won't let that happen. So he lets them assume he's some private with a death-wish, trying to abandon his post.

It matters that _he_ knows who he is, and that's all that matters.

"Interrogate him," Dooku says, not even trying to cover over the fact that what he means is 'torture,' "But I want him healthy enough for the modifications. And if the procedure fails, General, I will hold you personally responsible."

Cody has a very, very bad feeling.

* * *

An unknown number of hours, sixty-seven random four-digit identification numbers, and five obscene nicknames, none of which belonged to him, later, Cody waits in his 'cell,' feet up on the metal slab masquerading as a bunk. The ship hums smoothly through hyperspace, the unmoored feeling so familiar that if it weren't for the distant noises, all the time, of metal on metal, he could almost imagine himself trying to sleep on the off-shift between assignments.

He didn't _enjoy_ that. Despite what Rex occasionally suggests, he's not a maniac. But there was something fun, or maybe funny, about the way Greivous had got progressively more irritated, until he'd destroyed a wall terminal and the interrogation droid had had to ask him to leave.

Look on the bright side, right? What else can you do?

But now it's over, at least for a little while.

He suspects it's night rotation, back on the Negotiator. They'd left him in his semi-melted armour, less out of kindness and more because he doubts that a ship full of droids keeps a stock of blacks in his size; he appreciates the little bright point and slips his fingers into the space between the armourweave and plastoid, catching the tiny datastick and turning it in his fingers.

The list flickers into the air, projection wavering. With careful movements, he adds _Cutup_ to the end, and settles into the familiar recitation, lips barely moving with the sound—he doesn't particularly relish the idea of this turning up on the tapes. At least this isn't actionable intelligence.

_"Ni su'cuyi, gar kyr'adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum._ Neu. Veer. Terrible. CT-6834...."

* * *

There is a dream that comes, sometimes, whenever he's had a particularly bad day, or sometimes in the middle of a string of good ones just to fuck him over. The dream goes like this:

There is a suit of armour walking through the halls of a star that doesn't shine. There is nothing in the armour. Cody is the empty space that fills it up and moves its limbs, but that empty space isn't Cody.

* * *

When his batch were only cadets, too young to know that Alpha-6 was full of shit, they'd asked to hear the ghost stories. Six told them about all sorts of things, but the only thing that scared Kote was the story of the _kemrayc,_ the wandering ghost. Sometimes, Six had said, when a trooper dies bravely and is not given a pyre, and nobody remembers to say their name, the spirit will not rest; it wanders from star to star, seeking the brothers who forgot it.

The spirit can't touch anything, not without a body—Kote had wanted to say _that's not true, I can,_ but Fox had shushed him—so it seeks something to live in. It might find a rifle, and that rifle will shoot straight and sure, until it shoots the wielder. It might find a vibroblade, and the internal mechanism will never jam, the blade will never rust, not even to the hilt in a brother. Or it might find a suit of armour, put away carelessly and unloved, and that suit will stand on its own and walk and shoot, and nothing will kill it, because it is not alive.

Kote had not asked for ghost stories again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter in which the aforementioned body modification occurs; the scene itself, which is non-graphic and not gory, is from the third line-break to the end of the chapter if you want to skip it. It is later mentioned throughout and is a major theme.

They haul him to his feet again for deloading, with no intentions of letting him actually walk. He squints vaguely at the side of a battle-droid's head, wondering at the scratch on its optics, whether he had put it there himself.

If you can hit hard enough at the bottom of their fragile neck-spine link-up, the whole thing will come off. Contrary to common belief among the shinies, that might not disable the droid, because putting the brain in the skull instead of a well-armoured thorax was a serious flaw in the design of the human being, but it takes out almost the whole sensory suite, and from there, putting a boot in at the power core isn't difficult.

Or it wouldn't be, if he weren't cuffed, injured, restrained, and determined to see what their plan for him is. This is a significant enough deviation from the tactics he's now familiar with that it indicates something important brewing among the Seps, something that they'd missed until now. If he dies now, that plan will continue flying under the radar.

It doesn't make sense to incorporate a positive event with an infinitesimal probability into a rational tactical analysis, no matter how often the General manages to cause them. He doesn't expect to survive this, but he can be patient and collect as much information as he can. Eventually, there will come an opening, and he can try to get it back to the Republic.

The sunlight outside is blinding after so long in a dark designed for devices that see mostly in infrared, the sky a rich green-blue and streaked with grey clouds. In the distance, mountains that rise to vertical lines against the horizon, and beside the rain-black road, buildings in green glass with branching plants pressed against the windows, unbent by the wind. He's only briefly seen Serenno in holos; the Separatist blockade insulates it from the war.

On Serenno, so he's been told, life goes on. There's no war rationing, no orbital bombing sirens, no emergency hospitals built where schools used to be; the people of Serenno support the war the same way the people of Coruscant do: safely.

He's shuffled into the back of a transport and tries to remember the turns, but after a certain point he has to admit that he is lost as lost can get. The information isn't useful, so he prioritises and lets it go.

He hasn't slept. If he hadn't left his chronometer next to a bomb, he'd be able to say since when, but he blew up most of his equipment, so he just knows he hasn't slept in too long.

His shielding is rough work, because he's tired, and hungry, and he _hurts_. He needs, quite desperately, to take a few hours alone in a dark room and wall himself off from the world again, but somehow he suspects that won't happen for a while.

He'd listened, on Rishi. He hadn't had any other choice. And it had flooded through him and opened channels in his brain that were supposed to be quiet and still, and he didn't know how to make them silent again.

So he just stands, tries to lean in such a way that doesn't jar the melted-plastoid burns, tries to find a flaw in the cuffs, tries to breathe.

* * *

(This is what you do if you don't want to be seen:

You sit in the quiet. You listen to the body and you listen _only_ to the body. You catalogue every sensation: the colours of the insides of your eyelids, the sound your own blood makes in the body, the pressure of the floor, the warmth you're giving off, the movement of the air through you, the tiny signals the body makes to talk to itself. The feeling of your muscles pulling at your bones. The shifting and aligning of the spine, minute and constant, to keep you sitting upright. The proprioception that tells you where you are in relation to yourself. The signals from the inner ear that report back on gravity.

You realise that there are feelings with no source. Sensations, tiny and constant, bright, that come from inside of you, but not inside of the body. You don't dwell on them or catalogue them; you tell them, _no._ You will not listen. You are the physical and nothing else.

You stand and you go on with your work.

Cody is very good at this. There is nothing to him except the blood and the bone and the nerves, and there is nothing in his mind that isn't real.)

* * *

He jerks awake as he's hauled out of the back of the transport, his neck radiating pain down his back in protest at the fact that he'd fallen asleep standing again, without even his helmet to stop his head falling into ridiculous angles. For a moment, a clear peaceful moment where he's just confused, he forgets what's happened; he's on Kamino, dragged out of his bunk at an obscene time in the morning for a surprise training engagement, and he thinks that the grey sweeps of metal on either side are just the trainers in their beskar.

But Kamino comes in three colours: white, white, and beige. The hallways here are wide, built to accommodate droids and huge hovercarts of equipment; he's encountered biolabs before, mostly against his will. He's never been in one like this, the walls and ceilings made of more of that pale green glass, just clear enough to give the illusion that you can see right through the compound. Transparency without giving anything away. The floors above and below are blurs of people moving, mechanisms rolling along fixed tracks; he can't make out faces. He can't see what they're doing, not at all.

Everything is vaguely outlined, him included. The doors are difficult to see and the directions are impossible to tell; it feels like this facility goes on forever, in every direction, little glass boxes with little glass people moving in them.

He doesn't have time to take it in, though, because the sound comes through the sterilised air the same way it'd come through the fog on Myrkr.

It's not a howl; a howl rises and falls, and a howl should be a little bit ragged and sad. (Wolffe had told him that, very seriously after encountering rotgut for the first time, and Cody still remembers it.) Vornskr hunting calls are high and clear, like warning sirens, and hold a steady tone. They don't sound like a noise made by a living thing, and they make no damn _sense—w_ hy would a hunter give away its location? But there's no disadvantage as far as the beast is concerned. A vornskr doesn't care if you know it's there. It doesn't care if you run, or if you fight, and it particularly doesn't care if you hide.

The vornskr knows it'll eat you, in the end, one way or another. This is what the vornskr is. It is not good or bad; it is not cruel or kind; it is only hungry.

He thinks, for one hysterical moment, that these are the same beasts from when he was a cadet, that they've come across the universe. His boots scrape on the floor as he struggles, tries to turn and run, but the droids hold him tight, and he only bruises his arm further.

But the beast—there's only one, or it would have returned the call, why is there only one—isn't here for him. It's here for the same reason Cody is; because the Separatists brought him here.

Why?

_Why?_

There's a commotion going on up ahead. Good. They should be scared; there's a vornskr in there!

Maybe the beast will eat the Separatists after it eats him. But he knows it won't. It'll be like last time, like the training engagement on Myrkr when he was two and a half years old; they'll ignore all his brothers, ignore Alpha-9 and the trainers sent to observe, ignore Neu and Veer with the rotary cannons, and hare down the canyon in pursuit of Kote, out of ammunition and almost out of hope.

He had a knife, then, and a helmet. Now he has neither.

But his scrambling isn't getting him anywhere; he's still being dragged along the corridor, and the wail gets louder. Hungrier.

The shadows behind the glass coalesce as he approaches, and there's a familiar silhouette, facing a flickering blue shape that has to be a holo-call. Why do they have a longneck? What kind of facility is this supposed to be?

The door isn't marked, of course. None of them have been.

The Kaminoan blinks at him serenely, eyelids flickering. "Fascinating," she says, slow and cheerful, as the vornskr throws itself against the walls of the box they have it in, wild and hungry and desperate. There are patches of its fur missing, the distinctive scars of biopsy along its spine, and its claws have been clipped down to the quick.

"You and me both," Cody tells the creature.

The Kaminoan turns away from him, towards the holo, because the Kaminoans are never going to see the clones as anything except resources, assets, something to use until they break. Cody, he knows, is just a piece of industrial surplus. "My lord," she says, the way that the Kaminoans treat all off-world titles, as a cheap courtesy free of meaning, "Shall we proceed with the modifications, or investigate the new behaviour?"

"Proceed," Dooku says. "New stock will take too long to acquire."

* * *

Floating in the bacta tank is a little nostalgic, oddly enough.

He dreams; mostly, he dreams of the growth tank. Quiet, and painless, and dark. On all sides, the glimmer of other minds, dreaming in their own tanks; he hasn't met his brothers yet, but he loves them already. The dream is one long moment, unchanging and peaceful. Life was simple, once.

He's never been able to tell if this is a memory or something he invented after he'd been decanted, but it's a nice dream, so he doesn't think about it too hard. His awareness ebbs and flows, tidal.

Once, he rises to the surface, or maybe just finds a different dream. He floats in the quiet dark place, but it isn't bacta or a growth tank; he thinks it might be interstellar space, or somewhere else. He hears voices, in chorus but out of sync; they list the names.

Each voice has a different list, but there are common points where they speak together. They sound tired; it's the end of the shift, or the beginning, wherever they are, and none of them are quite awake.

He recognises most of the names. He thinks they're creeping closer and closer to the present.

_Cutup,_ someone says.

_Torus,_ someone else says.

_Sunshine._

_Shara._

_Cody._

He tries to tell them he doesn't need to be remembered, but when he opens his mouth the liquid fills it, and his tongue is heavy. The liquid fills his lungs, and he can't speak to tell anyone he's still alive.

* * *

He comes out of unconsciousness like a diver comes to the surface of the water; warily, waiting for depressurisation to kill him without warning.

The world is tinted green by the bacta when he opens his eyes, and the image is curved and warped. Pain is deadened. The burns along his back are gone; the skin there will be new and tender, too full of nerves. Even the persistent ache in his knees has faded. The old hurts are gone, replaced with new, fresh pain, invented specially for the occasion.

He doesn't know what they've done; he can't move his head enough to tell. But wires, thin and branching, snake through the bacta, surgical frames he only vaguely recognises from listening to the medics talk about all the equipment they don't get to use.

They're for reconstruction, for giving the flesh a scaffold to adhere to while it grows back. But it's wired into his _face,_ the back of his skull, his hands, his spine; this isn't reconstructive, it's just constructive. Building something that wasn't there before.

He tries to move—to kick the glass, to scream, to haul himself out and start to break things—but the nerves fire and nothing happens. The Kaminoan watches him from the other side of the glass; he can make out the silhouette, the wide-eyed expression they make when they're curious about something, but nothing more than that, because the muscles that focus the gaze are also out of reach. She blinks at him; he blinks at her; she presses a button, and the darkness comes back.

He does not dream again.

* * *

He wakes alone.

He doesn't realise for a long while, because the bed he's been laid out in is so unreasonably, irrationally, inefficiently soft that he still thinks he's coiled in the warm embrace of sleep. To a man raised on training-barrack bunks and ship's quarters and occasionally the floor, it is uncomfortably soft; he feels unsteady, like it won't hold his weight.

The pain is mostly gone, now. What remains is the nagging ache he's had most of his life, the feeling of bone growing faster than it should.

Cody's been dosed a few times, when negotiations have gone badly wrong or, once, memorably, when a shiny had got a little experimental with the day's rations. He'd had that same feeling then as he does now, before he'd realised what had happened, the feeling that something is just a little wrong with his thought patterns. Thoughts don't trace quite right from A to B, but he doesn't know where they go wrong.

He—

He yawns.

This is a very involved process that takes place entirely without his consent. The inexplicable trigger of tiredness pings signals to his central nervous system; the central nervous system bypasses the brain and tells the mouth and diaphragm to brace for action; the tongue moves back and up, and the brain begins to panic, because the familiar sensations of the inside-the-mouth are gone.

The space is different. The muscles are different. The tongue brushes against teeth that were not, last time he checked, there.

The central nervous system pays no attention to the brain. Muscles that he is totally unable to remember previously having catch against the skull and pull; the jaw opens.

The _jaws_ open, and they open up and out, like some kind of toothy flower. Air rushes into the lungs. And then they close again, and his head goes back to being approximately head-shaped.

"What the fuck," he tries to say. This was a very bad idea; the sound is only vaguely recognisable as speech. He jerks himself upright and slips sideways on the too-soft fabric, hands flying to his face.

He feels out the edges of his face, tentatively, finding the shallow ridges at the cheeks and chin, the places where the... Well, he doesn't know what to call them. 'Mandibles' doesn't seem quite correct, and a humanoid species typically doesn't have tripartate jaws with a half dozen different hinge points.

He nudges his tongue along the inside of his mouth, tentatively, as though he'll encounter something hostile in there, which is possibly not far from the truth.

Vornskr, he'd gathered in the post-exercise debriefing after Myrkr, eat rarely but well, often hunting prey larger than they are; they have fractious jaws, the way that snakes do, to allow them to drag in huge portions of flesh at once. The insides of their gullets are lined with cartilaginous ridges to digest whole prey; it's teeth all the way down, he'd joked to Wolffe, who hadn't got the joke.

Is that what they've done? _Why?_

It's all right. It's going to be fine. All he has to do is get out, get off planet, find a medic. This can be fixed, he's sure. Maybe he'll have some more distinctive scars, but that's fine.

His fingertips brush over his forehead, and he finds, with an indescribable amount of relief, that the bacta didn't heal over the scar at his temple.

Once he'd been promoted to Marshall Commander, he'd had a few offers from civilian medics to fix it. It's a simple procedure, he'd gathered, but he'd declined. He didn't have tattoos, though he'd thought about a few; he didn't even have a particularly fancy paint scheme. He let the scar be identifying enough, and let his work speak for him.

Besides, it impressed shinies. He was an avid follower of the private mythologies that rookies made up about him.

If the bastards had removed it, he may well have cut it back onto his face.

He staggers to his feet, his balance just subtly off, and isn't quite able to prevent himself from straightening the sheets he'd been sleeping on top of. His armour is gone, and he's still in the weird white jumpsuit getup they give civvie patients in medcentres; there's not even pockets, it's appalling. Not giving a man pockets is criminal mistreatment of a prisoner of war.

He'd once been given diplomatic quarters while working with the General, and they'd been something like this; far too large, covered in fabrics and miscellaneous carved organic materials he hadn't been able to identify. The windows are enormous and reinforced, transparisteel with the faint flicker of a trespasser's field. This time, the field is, he suspects, on the inside of the panes.

Then, he had taken one look at the rooms they'd given him and gone to crash in the barracks with everyone else. He sincerely doubts he'll get that option this time.

(A bird, four-winged and iridescent, flashes past the window; Cody's eyes snap to it, tracking the movement. It's easier to focus on the movement than anything else in the huge, silent room of unmoving set-pieces. It's because he's tense, for obvious reasons, he tells himself. It startled him. That's all.)

He finds a mirror, obnoxiously gilded, hanging on the wall as though it's meant to be art; he stares and stares.

Well, he thinks. He's worked in adverse conditions before. Perhaps having your face replaced counts as an adverse condition. He shakes his head, clicks something complicated and bony that he doesn't mean to click, and tries very hard to focus on something else.

He feels sick, numb, hungry, even though all that time in the bacta on a perfectly-calibrated nutrient drip has left him in almost physically perfect condition and the feeling is entirely psychosomatic. But he's never really _owned_ his body; he just lives in it most of the time. Intellectually, sure, he knows he should be having some kind of horrified fit, wanting to claw off his skin, feeling like something's been stolen, but he just doesn't. Sure, he's not doing great, psychologically; he can recognise that. It's in the disaster training handbook, section four, Resource Management. But it should be _worse._ Instead, it's like there's a layer between him and what he recognises as the appropriate response, transparent but solid, pins-and-needles in his mind. If he thinks in the wrong direction, he wonders, will the barrier break?

Species with non-human mouths talk in Basic all the time, right? And he has working vocal cords. He just needs to work out how to make the right shapes.

There's a project. Something to think about.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> marxist estrangement theory as applied to fictional clones from starred wars


	3. Chapter 3

By moonrise, Dooku judges that the project has had enough time to acclimate to his new surroundings. He is, evidently, correct, because when he keys the biopass at the door, he's met by a clone against the doorframe and a chair aimed squarely at his face.

He catches it neatly, steps back, toes the door closed with the edge of his boot, and sets it down back where it belongs. "Don't make this harder for yourself than it already needs to be," he says, resisting the urge to sigh.

The clone delivers a passable glare. He's seen better.

Resourcefulness in suboptimal conditions, he notes. That's a good sign.

"Now," he begins, pointedly ignoring the way the clone is standing, an aggressive starting stance for hand-to-hand, the kind used by someone who has had cause to use it. "I'd expect you'd like an explanation. I apologise that I was not able to explain before the procedure, but there was unavoidable work."

The clone makes a garbled noise, then another, and finally says, slowly and carefully, "We giving you problems on the Abrion front, huh?"

He pauses on individual syllables, trying them repeatedly until they sound approximately right. It is unpleasant to hear, but speech is secondary to his purpose. Dooku is pleased to see both that the modifications have successfully merged with his nervous system and that he has perseverance in the face of a challenge.

He misses having _good_ students.

The advantage of clones, and the reason that a comparatively minuscule force is giving the Confederation such trouble, is that they have the lateral thinking of sentients and the loyalty, unit cohesion, and unflinching obedience of droids. More fine engineering has gone into this man than into some of Dooku's own high-performance forces.

The disadvantages of the apprentices he's chosen previously are comparable; no unit cohesion, no loyalty, the bare minimum of obedience, and an excess of lateral thinking.

"You are indeed," he says, watching the movement of the clone's eyes. "It has significantly changed the scope of the project underway. I had planned to take an experimental sample directly from Kamino for proof of concept, but with the advance prevented, we were only able to obtain the one subject, yourself; but in this, as everything, the Force provides."

He thinks a moment, considering how to phrase this. Raised in the Temple, it is sometimes difficult to remember quite how rare force adepts are in the population. Working with the Federation has made it very clear why so much of the galaxy believes the Jedi to be myths; as far as most sentients are concerned, they may as well be. One would not expect to find a force-sensitive clone, not because they are in any way incapable of it, but simply because, on the level of population, there are not enough of them to raise the probability above a value expressible only in scientific notation. To find this one, then, and to not miss the opportunity by shooting him dead, to bring him to the vornskr—serendipity.

And the Jedi had missed him. Forgotten him. Who was it, he wonders, who led the force he served in? Did they know? Did they overlook him or did they ignore him? The flicker of rage is hot and bright, like a welding torch; the trick of the dark side is to narrow the flame and burn it red, blue, white, invisible and cutting. This isn't the way it should have been. None of this is the way it should be. Everything is broken and bleeding. He can't fix this piece, because he can't wind back the past, but he can correct the failure going forward.

"The first duty of the Jedi is the safeguarding and training of force-adept children," he says, and continues on as the clone snorts rudely. "No, I speak truly—peacekeeping, meddling in politics, warfare, these are all secondary. Or they ought to be, but the Order has fallen far. They have failed at their duty, and they have failed _you._ I intend to correct this failure."

There is something in the clone's expression, although warped by the modifications; something hopeful and tormented. It disappears quickly.

"I was unclear as to whether you knew," he says, and the twisted face the clone makes confirms his hypothesis. "But you did, and you chose to hide your talent. You will cease to do this while you are here."

There is absolutely no change in the clone's shields in response, blunt and unrefined but irritatingly effective. He doesn't test them. It won't achieve much.

"Happily, the ability of the vornskr operates with total disregard for the attempts we may make to shield or conceal ourselves, which was my reasoning for bringing one here; it is a mystery, and a useful one. By imparting to you some of their character, I have hoped to replicate it. The way in which it will interact with your own innate potential will be interesting, I believe."

(He says 'hoped,' but the fact of the matter is that the doors of the keep are designed to exclude sound, and still the clone had been prepared for his entry. He is fairly certain that he's been successful. What is yet to see is whether other traits will manifest. He will have to be warier of this apprentice than of his others, which is saying a great deal, working with Ventress.)

The clone makes a vague, rumbling noise. It may be an attempt at sardonic laughter, but it falls flat in every respect. "Done monologuing?"

"Almost. Bear with me." A little spirit is a permissible offence, he supposes. It's certainly one he was guilty of, when he was younger. "You will learn a great deal here. With your co-operation, it will be difficult but rewarding. Without your co-operation, it will also be difficult and rewarding, but it will also be unnecessarily painful."

There will, of course, be necessary pain. This is regrettable, but unavoidable.

"Now, I have further work. If you need anything, do not hesitate to inform the staff; you will be provided with any comfort you request."

It does not do to be inhospitable to guests. And some people deserve to live well. He can tell how clearly the clone believes this to be a trick, but it isn't. He is due a little finery, in exchange for what he will do.

"What I _request,"_ the clone says, halting, his face twisted in a way that is unpleasant to look at, _"_ Is my armour, my blaster, a comm and a ship off this rock."

"I will see what I can do," he says, admittedly insincerely, but the clone was not asking politely, so he considers it a forgivable falsehood.

* * *

An Incomplete List of Things That Cody Wants:

To hit Dooku in the face with a chair.

To learn everything, every single thing, that he's not been able to learn of the Force.

He does his best. He knows he can feel it, he knows he can feel it strongly, and he's picked up mythology and lore here and there and applies it best he can. But he's spent his whole life covering it over and pretending there's nothing there.

_This is the truth:_

The Generals are supposed to move the Force. Clones are not. His talent is a defect, he escaped quality control by a fluke, and defective clones are decommissioned if they cannot make themselves useful in spite of their defects.

_This is the truth:_

He's a person. He deserves to live. None of his brothers deserve to be decommissioned, not for anything. He shouldn't have to be useful to be alive. He deserves to be able to uncoil from behind his shields and reach out to the humming light where it waits for him. He has been done an injustice.

_This is the truth:_

Nobody has ever told him this. He's had to tell it to himself.

_This is the truth:_

Until now.

* * *

The obnoxious thing about the Kaminoans is that they're really very good at their jobs, and when you have three million and counting genetically-identical individuals, you work out what makes them tick.

That's why they wanted him, of course. Not him specifically, but clones. And that's why Dooku has the Kaminoan; some criminal exile, probably, although the category of person the Kaminoans consider a criminal is not precisely the same category as one might find elsewhere. If you want to make genetic changes to a population, it's helpful if you have a database of prior attempts in which almost everything has been checked for viability. People have assumed that the clones are genetically identical to Jango, just because he's the original.

This is a misconception. They're better. Their genome has been picked clean of inefficiencies; it's properly documented and reviewed.

For instance, clones don't get hiccups. It irritated the Kaminoans during the first iteration, apparently. It's not something he's ever going to complain about.

(The stories go that before they made the Nulls and the Alphas, the Kaminoans made a set where they just... turned off genes, without even doing cell cultures first, to see what they did. Turned other ones on. There's no proof, but then, there wouldn't be, would there? They wouldn't live long.)

Outside of the window, life goes on. The city is hidden away behind a park, or perhaps this... He hasn't seen the outside. This castle. Until further notice, he's going to assume Dooku lives in a castle, because it seems like the kind of obnoxious rich-person thing he would like. There are probably battlements. There are definitely dungeons.

In the distance, sky. In the distance, the stars. In the distance, people living, quietly, nothing to do with him. The lights turn on slowly, high-efficiency white and filling up the silhouettes of the skyscrapers in mosaic patterns.

The city breathes, as all cities do. Far above, out in the galaxy, the armies that they fund are gunning down his brothers; the money that flows to Serenno is worked from the blood of slaves; he doesn't know how much they know of it. Do they sleep soundly, knowing that the peace of this garden city is a lie?

There's his reflection, in the glass. He doesn't think he's gone this long without seeing another clone, before, not once in his life. He turns sideways, so that he can see the reflection in the corner of his eye, blurred enough that he can ignore all the things that are wrong.

He doesn't want Rex to be here with him; he doesn't want anyone here with him. He doesn't want to be here himself. But he wants to be not-alone, which is a different thing to being with-someone, and is a different thing again from being not-lonely. So he blurs the image and pretends.

If you hurt someone, and then you leave them in bacta and the skin grows back new and fresh and clean, did the hurt happen?

He nudges the inner shell of his shields, and thinks of baby snakes, coiled up behind their blast doors.

If you stick your hand in a bowl of water, and that water is the same temperature as the body, you can't feel the water. This often surprises people. Water has no feeling, it has no texture; it makes its presence known in its currents, the way it drags back against movement, and the feeling at the wrist, where the seam is. You can feel the point where the water moves against the air, in a cold circle against the pulse.

The same with the Force, against the mind instead of the skin. There is nothing to tell you it's there except in how it pushes and pulls, except in the seam against where it was not before.

He says, very quietly, with his mind rather than his mouth, _hello._ There is no answer. The Force doesn't speak Basic.

He's never understood the way that some of the generals talk to it, talk about it, as though it's a person and it's pleased to see them. But maybe it likes to make them feel welcome. He doesn't think he's welcome here, 'here' being the vast open space where the universe waits.

What does a Jedi do, to learn? He has no idea. He's never read a handbook of Jedi education. But if he did, he'd expect them to start simple and work up.

All right, Cody. Let's try to pick something up.

By the time the moon has risen over the treeline, he... Has given himself a headache, mostly. The muscles of his forehead ache from squinting, and the new, fresh-grown muscles of his jaw are worse; he can't grind his teeth anymore, he can only tense the muscles and feel the bone protest.

Nobody sat him down and said, 'here is the shape you make with your mind.'

He tries to send a command through the air like he would through the commlink, treats the painted vase on the sideboard like a subordinate unit, like it should salute to him and say 'sir' and leap up into the air. It does not.

He closes his eyes and imagines that the picture frame across the hall is in fact held in his hand before him, and that as he moves the image in his head, the image in reality will also move. It does not.

He just _pushes,_ holding himself still as his mind rasps against itself, hoping that effort will replace skill, hoping that if he can push hard enough against his mind that the sweat rolls down his back and his heartrate climbs, that the white pillow will push itself across the room in response. It does not.

He lies flat on his back and looks at the ceiling until the spots fade from his eyes. Then he dusts himself off and tries again.

The General is always going on about peace and tranquility and suchlike. Cody approves of tranquility, in theory. He hasn't had much of it.

Come to think of it, this is probably the longest he's ever gone without a pressing, urgent task or a little awful hurry-up-and-wait.

He does not like it.

Still, there may be something in it. He tries to sit cross-legged, the way he's seen it done, but the lack of badly-designed sheb-plate digging into his pelvis is an incredibly uncomfortable reminder that he has no armour at all. He feels peeled, like a shucked oyster, wriggling on the ground, like his skin should be meat-red instead of the correct shade of brown.

So he lies down. The tiled floor is smooth under him, warm even though it ought to be chilly, because this is a rich-people house, and that means unnecessary luxuries. He flattens his palms against it, and focuses on the feeling until he can ignore how his hands are wider and longer than they ought to be.

He calms himself the way he would if he were panicking as the artillery came down; ruthlessly, efficiently.

Then he waits for something to happen. What happens is that he falls asleep.

* * *

Vartai leaned forward, forearms on her knees, and eyed the cadets skeptically. "You unlucky lot might be saddled with Jedi, I hear," she said. "So I thought I'd teach you a couple things to help you deal with those creepy psychics."

Fox stilled his fingers where they drummed against his cuisse, and then started the rhythm again, because stillness is just as suspicious as the wrong kind of motion. Vartai had taught them that the week before.

Kote learned that lesson, too. He only shifted up a little, as he always did when a new lesson is announced, eager for new training to throw himself at, but Fox could see a minute stiffness to the way he held his head. Also, he'd forgotten to breathe. They'll work on that tell.

(Fox likes watching his brothers. He has most of his batch figured out, he thinks. Kote has been much less of a mystery, since Myrkr.)

"Some of them can pick thoughts out of your head before you're done thinking them," Vartai said, with a curl to her mouth that suggests she might have been messing with them. "Secrets. Feelings. Best not give them any more slack than you have to."

Two hours later, they all sloped down to the mess hall, wrung out. Except Kote, who usually ran himself ragged in training; he was quiet, smiling, loping along steadily. Like something had changed inside his head. Fox didn't like it then and he doesn't like it now, though he looked happy. He looked closed off, too, like the shutters had closed on his face. The cut on his temple had closed by then, but still red with blood as it healed under the skin, and it made him look harder. Colder, maybe. Maybe just older.

"What did your batch have?" the tiny CT asked, Rex, who Kote was always harassing in morning physical. 

"Some metaphysical _osik,"_ Fox said, firm enough to override whatever Kote was about to say. He didn't want any more evidence, not even on the audio tapes of the corridors, which they all know are barely ever checked.

(Later, in a field test, once they're maybe-hopefully- _please_ out of range of the audios, Cody tells Ponds about making the mind into an ammunition shell, into a surface with no flaws, a tank without an entry hatch, no way in and no way out, and Ponds tells Wolffe, who tells Fox. He's old enough, by then, to understand why it might be nice to make the brain shut up for a little while, but he asks Cody-- Cody says he does it all the time. He says he has to. It lets him sleep, he says.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> physically felt unclean writing the dooku pov i want u all to know. 
> 
> how DOES the force work? who knows? Who Knows? not cody :)


	4. Chapter 4

He wakes later in the night, with the starlight coming down through the windows, his heart rate slow and his breathing steady. If he dreamt, it slips away into unremembering.

There is a glass of water on the sideboard; he can't remember when it got there. He sits up; he makes a space in the air where the glass ought to be, instead of where it is. He doesn't realise he's awake until it touches the skin of his palm.

This is how you go on: you make a space for yourself in the future, where you ought to be, instead of where you are. You don't put the moving force behind you and shove; you just break your back, that way.

"Huh," he says. It seems to encompass things.

* * *

Cody believes in hobbies, in the abstract. The pursuit of skill for purposes of enjoyment and self-improvement is a fine thing, excellent for morale, and he encourages his men to take up whatever pastimes they take a fancy to. Various fabric-craft-minded clones have, over the course of the war, made the _Negotiator_ a much, much more comfortable place to work, and, of course, they all rely on the inkers and painters. Art, he believes very strongly, is important, and so are puzzles, stories, non-training sporting activities, group outings, and the like.

They improve efficiency. They make life a little more worth living.

But Cody himself has very little free time and less money. He has no eye for design, and no particular motivation to teach himself how to put shapes together; he enjoys the repetitive, detail-oriented aspects of many crafts, but they require an investment of time he doesn't have, and sometimes the last thing he wants is more time spent in his own head. He knows that many of his shinies are under the impression that he spends his off-shift time battling rancors with the CC squad or harassing rookies into completing training sims in record time, and while the training sim thing is at least partially true, his batchmates are stationed too far away to see them with any regularity, and certainly not all together.

What Cody likes to do on the off-shift is find a few brothers, sit down in the back of the group, and listen. Sure, he also likes to wait until someone slips up and heckle them into oblivion; he's got an _ori'vod_ obligation to torment people. But he likes to be talked to instead of reported to. He likes to be not-in-charge for a little while.

But he's in charge of a hell of a lot. He can't do that, not with his subordinates, not properly. He even outranks _Rex,_ and he worries that sometimes Rex remembers that.

So in his off-time he usually just keeps working. What else is there to do? There's always work.

Or he reads. The amount of material available without a paywall on the holonet has been steadily decreasing over the course of the war, but there are still plenty of star systems with public databases of literature, and he's rarely at a loss for holos on agricultural philosophy, or the martial arts systems of a species with seven arms and what they can teach a humanoid fighter, or logistics management, or the intricacies of the caf production process.

Or—he's no engineer, but comms technology is specialised. He took the communciations path on Kamino before he tested onto Command track, because they were short on communications officers and it gave a cadet more choice about which squad to join, and he had been entirely shocked to find he enjoyed it. He likes the logic of it, the way communications technology takes theoretical physics concepts and makes them absolutely practical, the million ways there are to bundle up data and store it and the ways that that affects how people live and talk to each other. So maybe there's a design, somewhere in the GAR databases, for a new resonant transmission-receipt system, the kind of tiny piece of equipment that nobody thinks about, but that lets them co-ordinate action across half the width of the Galaxy.

It's not finished. There's something missing, and he doesn't like to think about it too much, because he starts thinking about after-the-war, about what he wants to do with his days if there's no war to fill it up, and he doesn't... He can't...

He just can't.

He used to like tactics games. He likes that he knows all of the rules, and they never change. More complicated simulations just stress him, but he likes Dejarik, he likes Fullstasis, he likes Leave. The General keeps a board in his quarters, and Cody had seen it, asked, and then gone back to his quarters and found the rules on the holonet and memorised them.

So they'd played, occasionally. He'd been very terrible, and then he'd been very good, because when Cody wants to learn something, he learns it all the way. It had been very, very nice. An hour or two with his helmet off, the General running his fingers through his beard as he considered the pieces; a serious challenge with absolutely no risk of death. The bright flare of victory, without the ache of battle. They talked, and they didn't talk of the war.

But the General looked up at him, sometimes, trying to anticipate his moves, or just to look at him. Bright-eyed. Once, he'd called him Cody instead of Commander. He'd lost that game very badly, and he hadn't gone back again.

Back on topic. He doesn't have any damn money, which is a problem when it comes to finding ways to use his off-shift. Coruscant is designed to extract credits from people for just standing around.

He gets paid, of course. Not much, and he hadn't realised at first that it was for his personal spending; he'd thought it was another discretionary budget line, and used it accordingly. He still does. If his thirty credits can buy a few nights worth of unnecessarily nice meals, a set of paints and paper, a new stack of novels, or a repair job on that spare speeder's back thruster that keeps going out at critical moments during search-and-rescue, then he doesn't have to debate where it's going. The only clones with less money than squadron command are the medics, and that's _with_ Cody having to fight Bones to a standstill to make him let Cody pay for the new osteotractor.

So he keeps a close watch on things that are free. He sometimes does things just because they're free. It's free to run a circuit for an hour while the suns come up and the light comes down through the glass and steel of Coruscant's upper levels. It's free to stare at buildings on Naboo and scroll through a text on his HUD about architectural styles from centuries he can barely comprehend had people living in them. It's always free to absolutely decimate a training droid.

Sometimes, it's free to go to the theatre run by the Temple. He hadn't expected that; he hadn't expected it to exist at all. He'd expected the Jedi to do hobbies the same way he did: theoretically. But there's a tiny theatre, and once every month there's a group putting on a play he'd never heard of. That isn't saying much; they don't teach the Pantoran realistic dramatic tradition on Kamino.

(Sometimes, it's younglings in very silly costumes, taking everything very seriously, and those are just wonderful. They come out on stage afterwards, and the crowd of Jedi and one Cody applauds, and they all beam, looking like the children that they seem to want to forget they are. He gets the impression that these performances are not supposed to have much literary merit, but he doesn't care.)

He can't see as many of the performances as he'd like, because he's moving all the time, but it's wonderful, when he can.

The first time he'd gone, he'd only had a vague idea of what theatre actually was. He thought maybe it was something like story-telling, but with lots of people all doing the voices, and he was sort of right.

General Windu had been there, which was also unexpected. He'd stood next to him, not by design but by chance, and he hadn't done what some nat-borns do when a clone tries to do Real People Activities.

> (Incomplete List Of Assorted Unpleasant Nat-Born Responses:
> 
> Assuming that they don't understand basic emotional responses. Trying to explain that the sad soprano in the libretto is sad when she's very obviously sad.
> 
> Asking them questions about shit that nobody would expect them to know and then acting superior when he does not, in fact, know of the sociopolitical context on Alderaan that informs the symbolism of purple starpoint flowers in this particular painting.
> 
> Acting like they're personally responsible for bringing civilisation to the savage war-mongers.
> 
> Acting like they're personally responsible for bringing culture to the unfeeling meat-droids, who do not know love, only gun.)

He'd just looked at him, hadn't made a smart comment, hadn't even raised an eyebrow; said 'Hello, Commander, Cody' in the exact same tone he'd said 'Hello, Master Vrai' a moment before, and stood in stone-faced polite silence until the dramatic climax of the first act, at which point he'd made a noise that indicated a cut-off snort of amusement, and Cody had made exactly the same noise. They'd looked at each other, the corner of the General's mouth had twitched up a millimetre, and they'd gone back to watching the play in, yes, stone-faced polite silence.

Stone-faced polite silence was Cody's second-favourite thing, after younglings performing the tale of such-and-such and the mythosaur. Stone-faced polite silence was reliable and reassuring and didn't expect anything from him.

Other patrons nudged each other at the interval and made conversation about storylines and act structures, or gossiped, or other things. Cody stood in silence. General Windu stood in silence. It was very pleasant. At the end of the evening they had nodded to each other and left, the business concluded. He looked forward to it happening again.

It had not happened again. He'd been kidnapped, which tends to put a crimp in a man's social life.

* * *

"Move it."

For a long time, he refuses. It doesn't end well for him. It's not even particularly satisfying, because Dooku works out that he's doing it to see the frustration build, and once he smooths his face (and the candle-flare of his anger) it's not nearly so fun.

At a certain point, he has to resort to rationalisation. Dooku's time that he wastes is time he isn't spending plotting. This, it turns out, is an even stronger motivation than giving into the base older-brother instinct to make an obstruction of himself; he can take the knowledge and turn it into steely discipline, which firms the spine and doesn't burn through fuel like spite does.

Then the two hours end and he's back in the gilt-edged and upholstered cell, with nothing to show for it.He has an idea. It should have occurred to him earlier, but his mind was otherwise occupied. Dodging mental attention, it appears, it much easier when nobody is intentionally trying to climb into your brain and set about with a meathook.

So the next day, when he's back in the room without the windows, he makes a shape in the future. The shape is an edge.

With his wrists cuffed to the table, he picks up the pebble and flings it in a clean arc at Dooku's temple. Like running direct into a brick wall, it stops hard in mid-air, and the recoil tries valiantly to flick his brain out of his ears. A throbbing headache starts in the back of his skull.

The stone, an edged piece of flint, glints in the overhead lights. It shifts a millimetre; it shifts back. Dooku reaches up and pulls it out of the air, smiling like a loth-cat.

"Again."

* * *

He slinks back to his box like a wounded animal, carrying its guts, bear-trapped leg left somewhere behind him. And there is his reward for co-operation, once the door locks behind him.

> Inventory:
> 
> One blaster of unknown but familiar make, Serenno design. Mid range barrel, long range sights. Unpainted. Serial number SA-5 LR 894523 Limited Run. Designed not to explode when the power charges are crushed, unfortunately. Bulky with unnecessary electronics and atargeting system. Absolutely no opening, chink, unscrewable point, or point of weakness on the casing by which one industrious and motivated clone might disable the system which prevents it from firing when aimed at a series of objects including but not limited to:  
>  The window.  
>  The door.  
>  The door lock.  
>  The window.  
>  A bookshelf.  
>  A vase.  
>  A painting.  
>  An irritatingly-shaped knot in the wood of the sideboard.  
>  The window, again.
> 
> Seven full sets of non-jumpsuit clothes in assorted styles, finely made but generic, sized to fit. Comfortable in the same way that the mattress is, ie. soft enough that it is clearly meant to be, and too soft to actually be comfortable. Not enough pockets. A sop of a reward, since he doesn't want any of them.
> 
> One properly practical black armourweave undersuit, with pockets. It is impossible to make armourweave comfortable; creative tailoring can make up for the lack of stretch, and good fitting can prevent the seams from actually doing injury, but nothing will make it light or breathable or good to wear without also removing its ability to prevent a high-energy blaster bolt from inflicting burns down to the bone. He puts it on immediately.
> 
> One set of armour, minus a vambrace. Metal unidentified, layered core, heavier than plastoid. Slightly too large. Painted grey by someone who didn't know what they were doing. Good solid reinforced boots, something wrist-mounted that had been removed with an engineer's vibroblade and left a burr, helmet.

He doesn't notice until he has the legset on that the straps and their buckles are comfortably worn, with the lines and creases of use. He sits down sharply.

There is a scar in the metal of the placard, underneath the paint, where the repair job has left a speckled texture and a narrow seam. He wonders if that's what killed the owner, if it was an old injury, if they'd died fighting.

This is _beskar._ A weak alloy, for symbolic purposes—it'd be a lot heavier, otherwise—but it's a full suit of beskar'gam with the clan symbol removed by some technician with an angle grinder, on Dooku's orders. Because he'd said he'd wanted his armour, and then he'd given Dooku what _he_ wanted.

What can you do? This is abhorrent.

There is nothing he can do to fix it. Someone is dead, and their armour's been stolen, and now Cody has it; does that make Cody the thief, if he wears it?

How long ago did they die? Was this waiting in some armoury, or did they kill them special for him, because he'd asked for armour? Which is better?

He's a thief if he wears it and an idiot if he doesn't.

(When he thinks about the future, when he thinks about after-the-war, part of the dream is that he'd go to the Mandalore system. Get to see it, the place where the stories come from. And maybe someone would say, _Cody, you've worked hard. You've protected your men. You've fought valiantly and followed the Resol'nare as best you can. We think you ought to have this,_ and he'd have... A pauldron, or a chestpiece, maybe, if he were lucky, of beskar, something to show he was doing this properly. A reward for all the bullshit. Something he could put a clan symbol on.

He doesn't have a clan symbol, because he doesn't have a clan, because he's not a Mandalorian. He's just a clone.

This is abhorrent, but his thoughts, to his shame, aren't _no;_ instead, he thinks, _not like this.)_

He puts it on. He has no advantages, here; he has to take what he can get. Or, at least, he hopes that's why he's doing this.

* * *

"Again."

"Again."

"Again." 

Every time, he goes back to his quarters—his cell—with a bundle of barbed wire in his head.

* * *

This time there are two sets of footsteps outside the door, and a murmur of voices.

"I thought, Councillor, you might like to see a project I'm rather proud of," Dooku says, smug and, in his own way, cheerful. He's having a good day, and Cody hates that he can recognise that now.

They come through the door, Dooku leading a tense Zygerrian in lavish robes, some contraption blinking on the arc of his brow. Cody wants to snarl. He wants to _bite._

The flint clinks against the table; before Dooku opens his mouth it's flying, but as always, over and over again, it stops at the highest point in the arc. The Zygerrian takes a step back and almost stumbles, wide-eyed, but for a moment, Cody can't tell if he's jerking away from him or from Dooku. He's bleeding fear into the Force, so strongly that even Cody and his garbled understanding of how to read the shifting currents of intuition can feel it, but he doesn't know _why._

"I'm so sorry, Councillor," Dooku says, with the kind of smile that means he's planning something. "This one's a little defective. But we'll make more."

Cody breathes out, long and slow. The ache is back. He reaches out.

It's like a fall headfirst from orbit. It's like his whole body is a bell and he's the hammer. It's almost but not entirely unlike being struck by lightning. It's like absolutely nothing at all, and all the similes are shadows on the cave wall.

For just a moment, the hand that doesn't exist tightens on Dooku's neck, and there's something in his eyes like a shiny facing down a platoon of droids. Cody smiles for what feels like the first time in weeks, and then his head slams back into the metal of the chair behind him and stars burst across his vision.

" _Better,_ clone," Dooku says, and his voice rasps. The flint leaps into the air like sparks, and Cody feels the barrier go up again, but that's all right; he's aiming elsewhere. The Zygerrian crumples, pale yellow haemolymph flecking the curtains behind him.

The world is still. The Force hums, low and satisfied. Dooku laughs.

"Excellent," he says. "I think you may be worth training, after all."

Separatist Councillors aren't expendable, not to Dooku. He spends too much time wooing them with bribes to risk one like this. The Zygerrian wheezes, but quieter. He was, Cody thinks, struck still and sick by horror, brought here to die; brought here to see if Cody would do it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> someone mentioned that they were having trouble visualising what is up with Cody's mouth here, so i've put together a few of my sketches here: https://far-sector.tumblr.com/post/642130218252959744/so-a-few-people-in-the-comments-of-my-very-weird
> 
> please feel free to ignore them if they conflict with an image in your head that you like! that's how text works, after all.

An untrained Force adept is a dangerous thing, in a completely different way to the understandable danger of a trained Force adept. The untrained are dangerous because nobody's told them what the Dark is.

What Cody knows is that the Dark Side is bad, and you use it by... Well, nobody particularly though he ought to know. And the Light Side is what the Jedi use, and you use it by being a Jedi, probably. Or maybe using the Light Side is what makes you a Jedi. Or maybe neither, and there's some other requirement. It's none of his business, at least as far as his training is concerned.

This would be easier if he'd had a few years worth of intensive tutoring, but what he has is rumour and myth. And the Force is the Force, right? Skill is skill, and technique is technique, and in the absence of weaponry that works or any way out of here, he has to use what's available to him.

(Also, it's not like he has anything _else_ to do.)

So when the books come, he reads them. A datapad, at first, pre-loaded, without holonet access, and then real physical books, printed paper.

Some of it is nonsense. Some of it is incoherent, but only on the second pass; at first sight it looks reasonable. Some of it makes sense, in some fundamental way, like a simple truth about the world that he'd not thought anyone else had seen before, pinned down in words. Some of it is useful. Some of it is vile. Some of it gives him a headache. Some of it is stories.

He reaches the end of the stack, and he sits cross-legged on the floor for a long time, thinking.

All he has is theory. It's theory he's never had before, and it's theory that presumes a great deal more familiarity with academic understanding of the Force than he actually has, but he's a practical man. Learning things just for the sake of learning them is a luxury, and it's not one he gets often. It's a luxury he rations to himself, keeping hologram lectures of frivolous facts stuffed unwatched at the bottom of his pockets until after this battle, this supply run, this campaign.

So he _itches_ to get out of this room and start testing things. He can't. Instead he just starts back at the beginning again.

* * *

> An abbreviated list of possible interpretations of the phrase 'Peace is a lie, there is only passion:'
> 
> You are being lied to when you are told that you live well and peacefully. Your prosperity is bought and sold with warfare, and your participation allows it to happen. Accept this, and you prosper more.
> 
> The true state of things is change, not constancy. Embrace it. Change with it.
> 
> The Sith are full of shit, and their Code is a collection of words that, on first acquaintance, sound meaningful, but are designed to be twisted to any interpretation you choose that allows you to hurt people freely.
> 
> You are being lied to when you are told that you live well and peacefully. Your prosperity is bought and sold with warfare, and your participation allows it to happen. Reject it utterly. Only engage in the violence which you choose; never allow yourself to be complicit.
> 
> There is no rational response. All sentient creatures are governed first and foremost by emotion. This is the root of the bitter tree. Understand the complex, twisted, furious core of emotion that leads you to do what you do; abandon the comforting idea that there is a logical reason why you do things.
> 
> You cannot live without harming others, so live and do it on purpose.
> 
> You cannot live without harming others. This is a statement free of ethical or moral value; it just is.
> 
> Someone, a long time ago, heard a Jedi recite a litany, and changed the words to irritate them. It stuck longer than it should have.

* * *

> An abbreviated list of possible interpretations of the phrase 'The Force will set me free;'
> 
> The Force will set you free.
> 
> The Force will set us free.

* * *

The Kaminoans are dying out. It's an open secret. By now, Taru Sau believes, they are outnumbered on their own planet by the army they created, and like their soldiers, they die.

They are dying out because they will not have children unless the children will be perfect; they are dying out because if the children are imperfect, it is the fault of the source code.

There is no dissent on Kamino. There is no warfare, there is no disease, and there is no failure. Taru Sau was lucky; she is fast and clever and she told nobody she disagreed before she left. Others were not lucky.

She spent a decade hopping from planet to planet, working on her own; she has a reputation, now. A reputation is valuable. Discreet aftermarket modifications. Fair prices, no contact with the law, no questions asked. It was only a matter of time before the Separatists contacted her.

She would have done this work for free. It was genius, and it would work; it was viscerally satisfying, like the ending of the trickster stories where the cruel lord gets his comeuppance.

The Jedi _ruined_ Kamino. A commission of that size just turned the surface into a factory, turning out sentient beings to die, and it ground the natives between the gears. It is fitting, then, to turn the soldiers they ordered against them, in the end. To make a hunter.

The human lord had brought her a vornskr, and the nebulous plan she'd been growing for years began to take shape.

Fett, she gathered, had a reputation; his skill was learning and adaptation. Taru Sau is more exacting in her work, and the project will be better. Optimised, rather than adapted.

On her orders, the Confederacy pushed forward to Kamino. She mourned for what will happen to her home planet, but it was already ruined, already only a shadow; they would bring her back a sample set on which to refine to procedure, or they would bring her back the base genome she needs.

She gets neither. She gets a single clone, captured during an abject failure of a military manoeuvre, a consolation prize. So, she supposes, he will just have to be perfect.

The human lord tells her that her only test subject mutated during the growth medium phase. She considers the options; there are things that can be done, treatments, the things that mean that no Kaminoan child suffers the hallucinations and rages that accompany contact with the Force. They are usually done for children; to inflict them on this subject will bring significant pain, and risk the death of her only opportunity.

She decides against it, eventually. He can be trained to overcome his disadvantages. Besides, there is the poetry of the plan to consider, its shape in history.

Taru Sau does _aftermarket_ modifications. Her clients are almost always her subjects. She has learned many things. She has learned that almost everyone believes themselves defective, in some small way that they are terrified of revealing; she has learned that to be defective is to always be preying on yourself, hunting down the imperfect creature that you tell yourself you used to be, and never quite catching them.

So she proceeds with the experiment. Vornskr are fascinating, from an evolutionary standpoint; they're not canids, they're barely mammals, but they'd found themselves filling that niche after a previous history as small undergrowth predators. Myrkr had underwent an extinction event, and in the absence of large predators, the vorkskr had filled the void, their whole body plan changing over the course of a few hundred generations as they hunted down the native lizard-beasts. They'd been far too successful, and harried most of the force-attuned species to extinction; if they hadn't been introduced into the old Sith empire, they'd have starved themselves to death.

There is a part of her that admires the kind of mind that thinks it reasonable to introduce an invasive species in order to eat one's enemies. The irony is not lost on her.

So she performs the procedure as requested.

She wishes she'd been able to find his designation number, to access his training records; this would be so much more effective if she'd been able to match his strengths and compensate for his weaknesses. But he is reticent in interrogation, she hears; it is a shame that the indoctrination of the Republic is so complete that he cannot understand that she is trying to _help_ him. She is trying to set him free.

With three hours remaining on a thirty-hour droid-assisted surgery, she is brought a sliver of metal, the size of her fingertip, designed to sit between layers of muscle in the neck. The design is different than the ones she's seen before; perhaps the human lord will not stoop so low as to buy explosive chips directly from slavers, and builds his own instead. Regardless, she comes to the realisation that she and her employer are ideologically at odds.

She installs it. She finishes the job she is contracted to do. This is a matter of honour. You have to finish the job you are contracted to do, and then you're free. More in his head will not do him additional damage.

They do not let her see her project. She is not permitted to oversee his training, as she demanded. After a week, she is summoned to meet with the human lord.

She is asked to produce another twenty, as soon as the raw materials can be found. She refuses. She is told to produce another twenty. She refuses; she will be leaving in the morning on a chartered ship. Her contract is completed. Her retroviral stocks have been destroyed and her data wiped; nothing can be recovered.

The human lord looks at her over his steepled fingers, as though she's broken contract or her word. She has not. She stands, impassive, in the knowledge that she is doing the correct thing, ending the story before it can grow out of her control, not falling to the old enemy of the Kaminoans, hubris, which tells them they can be perfect and make perfect things, if only they will sacrifice their conscience.

"Very well," the human lord says, and then red light fills the room.

* * *

Once, a mynock had gotten into a cruiser's power circulation system while the ship's engineering squad had been on the off-shift with a bottle of rotgut, and they hadn't noticed until the lights went out all at once.

This is just like that, except different in every way.

He's walking in the black, with communications silent, and he's trying to find Rex, reaching out into the dark for the familiar edges of his mind, but he's also trying to stay hidden. To stay silent. To search without being found.

He'd thought he'd failed, then, because he'd ran all the way across the ship to where he was holed up in one of the briefing rooms, and opened the door to the shine of Commander Tano's reflective eyes, and thought, _I'm caught, I'm dead._

But he wasn't. She hadn't said anything, though she had to know how he'd done it. Maybe Rex had words with her; maybe she'd just not understood what it meant; maybe she was waiting. She never seemed the type for blackmail, but Slick had never seemed the type for what he'd done, so.

It's his job to be suspicious.

The point is, he can find Rex in the dark. His batchmates, too, and his training squad, and a significant proportion of Ghost company, if push comes to shove, but it's Rex who has the bad luck to get lost in a collapsed mine or a power-free starfighter or a literal maze approximately every other week, and it's Rex he can find without really trying. He doesn't know why. Maybe it's because he knows him best; maybe it's because he loves him more.

He shouldn't have favourite brothers. It leads to bad decision-making, bad management, resentment; he likes to think he's pretty damn good at keeping clear of biases and not putting anyone first, and he likes to think that his men know that, but also Rex is his favourite.

So.

So he tries to find Rex, except this time he's not the other end of the ship, he's star systems away. Does the Force move faster than light, he wonders. Can it carry information past the lightspeed barrier? The jump into hyperspace doesn't cut you off from it, but it interferes; it feels slippery. Can you reach out from hyperspace and touch the rest of the world, in real time? Can you reach out from your own bubble of hyperspace and touch someone else's folded fragment of space-time?

Is the Force an exception, a capital-E Exception, to the lightspeed limit, like the q-protocol and the hyperdrive?

He imagines that it is. He imagines the whole universe, all of it happening at once, and he imagines himself outside of it, which renders the distances inside irrelevant the way a hyperdrive does.

Somewhere in there is Rex. All right. Where?

There is a field of stars. He isn't looking at them; there is no image, no hologram in his brain. He just knows they're there, like he knows there's air. They're moving in space, living and dying, and there's—there. There he is.

He's alive. At least, Cody is fairly certain that that particular life is Rex. He has no evidence for it, but he's learning that a great deal of listening to the Force is just believing the mind when it insists something without evidence. This does not come easily to him. He'd quite like to sit down with whoever designed the system and have a chat about intuitive interface design, because they clearly haven't encountered the concept before.

Now what? He's fairly certain he can't just talk to him, as helpful as that would be. Maybe he can tap out a message in Morse code.

He sighs. The HUD of his— _the_ helmet blinks uselessly at him, and he closes his eyes again.

He doesn't know to do this. He doesn't know how to say, _I'm here, I'm alive, I miss you, I'm still your brother,_ even though he's said it every day of his life until he couldn't any more. He knows how to make someone a mug of caf when they come onto the night shift, he knows how to annoy someone until they're angry instead of sad, he knows how to head up the charge and herd people behind him and face down the blaster fire, but he doesn't know how to curl up the feeling and send it across space.

Is anyone listening? Can anyone hear him? He feels like a ship drifting into wild space, the comm broadcasting to a field of static. And then he loses the thread, because he's reminded himself of the existence of physical distance, and the illusion collapses, and he's not sure if he ever had the contact in the first place.

You can lift a rock of any size, so long as you forget how large it is.

He doesn't want a civil chat with whoever designed this; he wants them to meet him in the alley behind 79's and choose a weapon.

A light flickers, and then dies. Nearby.

The field of stars is still there; he still knows they're there, out in the dark, and he's in there with them. He's always known them, he just couldn't see detail in the broad bright mass of the universe—but he can, now. He has the trick of it, he thinks, like piloting a jetpack.

He's never felt the dying happen before, not while paying attention. He's always been too busy with the actual practicalities of the dying, the shouting and the blaze of blasterfire and the cold of the vacuum or the resignation as the Kaminoans take another cadet away.

There's nothing to it. Easy as breathing. The star is there, and then it's gone.

He doesn't have a name to add to the list.

He doesn't know if he wants one. The Separatists don't note down the names of his brothers; why should he remember theirs? And then he catches that thought, considers it carefully, holds it up to the light to see through it.

Why not, he asks the thought. Do they owe him the courtesy of a memorial? No. He's done nothing to them to deserve one. Does he owe a memorial? No. Absolutely not. So it's up to him, free of obligation, to decide whether he wants to give one. He decides that he does. He considers the possibility of spite and, on balance of merits, rejects it.

That evening, when he says his remembrances, the list is shorter than it ought to be. There were three hundred and fifty-seven names; fifty-nine, including Cutup and Nameless Dead. He counts; he can remember three hundred and fifty-three.

* * *

Any teacher will tell you that they'd rather have a keen student than a talented one, and it may be Yan Dooku's curse to always have the talented students, and never the keen ones. Or perhaps the terrifying prophetic nightmares are the curse. It may be either.

Qui-Gon was talented, and he knew it, but he hated to be forced to focus; he latched onto the first idea he had, and then thought any attempt to sway him from it was an insult to his intellect. Asajj Ventress is frankly terrifying, and of course she devours any learning opportunity she can find, but her motivation is transparent; she wants power, and knowledge is merely a form thereof, and a stepping stone. Vos... Vos doesn't want to learn a thing, but his natural skill is useful enough to overlook it, when necessary. At least for now.

The clone, who still has given neither a name nor a number, but whom he has been thinking of vaguely as the prototype even now that he knows there will be no more, is turning out to be that rare example of both.

He is not skilled in the Force. He has an astonishing lack of skill, to the point where Dooku wonders occasionally how he survived to this age, before he remembers that until Dooku found him he was simply not using it, locking himself away. It makes him dangerous, the way that an unskilled swordsman is dangerous because he is unpredictable; he suspects that all that time restrained behind the walls of the mind has sent his presence in the force a little mad, the way that a man becomes strange all the way down to the core if he's kept away from contact and conversation, listening only to his own voice, echoing.

He is not skilled, but his inexperience makes it easy to overlook the fact that he is progressing at aspeed he has never seen before. There is no need to introduce external motivation for him, because he comes pre-equipped with intrinsic motivation; show him his ignorance and he launches himself at it without prompting. It's like watching a man declare his intention to turn back the tide with a bucket and then, with nothing but distilled effort and time, begin to succeed.

A continued period of—good behaviour is not the term, first because it has not been good, and secondly because the clone is not a prisoner, he is a student who does not understand that he has been rescued rather than kidnapped—behaviour less intentionally obstructive than it theoretically could be—has led him to grant him more freedom, for fear of the unhelpful sort of psychological damage.

He doesn't socialise, or so the reports from the security division say. He appears to regard the visitors to the keep as enemies he is currently unable to shoot, which may be accurate; he avoids contact with the sentient staff whenever possible, and does not prevail upon them at all, not even for directions; he might in fact be afraid of the droids, even those without combat capabilities, which will need to be trained out of him. He goes directly from his rooms to the training ranges, engages in a regimen designed by someone without an ounce of compassion, and then proceeds to disappear into the library until he is unable to keep his eyes open. He does not operate according to the standard circadian rhythm, and avoids sleep.

He wears the armour provided to him. That's understandable. There is significant value to being _seen_ to have a Mandalorian on staff, even if he is only shaped like one. And if Dooku had found himself looking like that, he might possibly find himself developing a taste for full-face helmets with opaque visors.

He should have known that the geneticist was unstable when she laid out the proposal, but she had been so insistent on the value of the venom to the vornskr's hunting methods, and it is the hunting pattern that is important. Alas.

On a bright morning, when action is progressing smoothly on all fronts and there is a rare lull in the constant internecine feuding of the Confederation, he is able to clear a portion of his schedule and collect the project.

Dooku has learned to recognise the clone's distinctive tells; he squares his shoulders in a particular manner when he is about to make another murder attempt. He waits, does not turn his back, and is slightly surprised when the attempt comes in the form of a fist, uncomplicated but very, very fast.

It shows, he thinks, a lack of imagination, or perhaps a lack of hope of success. It does not make contact, and he does not try again, but walks quietly behind him. His anger is masterfully contained behind bulwark shielding, but it is not contained in his manner or posture, and the contrast is interesting.

Like many bulky men (and unlike many Mandalorians, who tend to rattle,) he walks very quietly. Perhaps he threatens the metal until it sees the wisdom of silence.

Even after so many years, the beauty of his home planet comes as a surprise. Coruscant was beautiful, but on Serenno, with the bright sky filtering the light of the distant star into greens and blues and the ever-present curve of glassworks, he will sometimes turn a corner and find a tree older than his father's father curling up towards the ceilings of the vaulted hallway, facets glinting against the leaves, and have to pause a moment to look.

The people of Serenno were artisans, once. They built things like this. Places like this. He has read his father's journals; he knows that he had hoped they would be again. Automation of industry was supposed to make _more_ art, not less; it was supposed to _save_ lives. The point of a droid is so that a sentient doesn't have to do the job, so they have the time to do other things. Make other things.

But something went wrong, and now Serenno mostly manufactures battle droids, and there are fewer and fewer people every day.

Behind him, the clone makes a strange noise, blurred and distorted by the helmet; he suspects it's not a noise a human could generally make. He stands still, one hand clenching in and out of a fist, and the blank visor is fixed at where a splendid weaverbird perches, trembling as small animals often do, on the curling arm of the tree.

Good. He is not so much a fool as to think the Dark Side is a free path to power. This will go much more smoothly if the clone remembers that there are beautiful things, and they do not all need to be destroyed for the crime of being out of reach.

He forgets, himself, sometimes.

But they have work to do. As they arrive at the training halls, he holds out the sabre. He is concerned that the clone will try to kill him in any manner of ways, yes, but when it comes to swordsmanship the risk is simply nonexistent.

The clone is evidently aware. He doesn't hesitate to take the blade, but he also does not take the obvious opening when Dooku turns his back to close the salle behind them. A shame. It could have been an opportunity for a lesson.

Red flickers and hisses. The clone holds the borrowed weapon away from his body, like a snake, and stares at it like it's about to take a swing at his head, which, at least, is sensible; the moment you forget that your blade will cut you just as well as it cuts your enemy is the moment you die.

He remembers, suddenly, very strongly, taking Rael to Ilum. His pride. His uncomplicated joy. The clone will never have that. The only thing he can offer him, now, is a lightsaber taken from a dead man on Korriban in the early days of his apprenticeship; the ancient rites were denied to him. It will never be truly his.

Before, it would be unthinkable to teach a candidate of his level of training, his level of understanding of the Force, to duel. But times change, and now he hears that padawans are asked to command squadrons. He must learn to defend himself. No; Dooku corrects himself. He must learn to attack, if he is to fulfil his purpose.

"We will begin," he says, and the clone's head snaps up. Unprompted, he raises the blade and sets his feet. It is, in fact, a passable Soresu starting stance, which is unexpected to say the least.

He attacks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Facts About Cody:  
> 1\. he's a bitch.  
> 2\. he's a boss.  
> 3\. now, in armour that isn't covered in grime and scratches for the first time since the start of the war, one could possibly say that he shines like gloss.
> 
> (I am so sorry.)


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quinlaaaaaaaaan

Quinlan doesn't have a _surfeit_ of positive feelings towards Dooku's newest apprentice. Not that he realises immediately that that's what he is.

At first, he thinks him another mercenary captain, or possibly a hostage to secure the loyalty of another mercenary company. The people here don't ask each other questions, especially not questions like 'Why are you here? or 'Why don't the droids let you out into the city?'

Quinlan watches him the way he watches everyone here: sideways, so he can claim he wasn't doing it. He goes from place to place very fast, avoiding people; he sets up in the training hall and shoots things, repetitively and obsessively, but that's just what Mandalorians are like; he throws himself bodily at combat droids and dismantles them into small pieces with no evident weapons besides his hands. Shortly after he arrives, there is an upgrade to the standard droids provided. It doesn't seem to help much.

The point is that when Quinlan hauls himself into the body of the short-hauler ship he's been provided for this particular outing, he's not expecting to see a silent man in black metal leaning up against the bulkhead, as if waiting for him.

"'Lo," he says, rallying magnificently. "Think you might be lost, pal."

The blank helmet says nothing. He holds out a file of flimsi, as though it's an answer for why he's in a restricted area and interfering with the life of a man who has, as far as he can remember, never talked to him before. With the reluctance of a man who has never voluntarily done paperwork in his entire life, Quinlan takes the sheet and snaps it straight.

It is the precise mission briefing he'd been given, himself. At least, he assumes so; he barely remembers reading it. They all start to blend together, after a while. Go to place, kill someone. Go to place, blow something up. Go to place, commit atrocities.

He does his best to make it less terrible than it otherwise could be. Better him than someone who enjoys it. Better him than, for example, Ventress, who seems to operate on the principle that if she racks up enough unnecessary casualties, she'll unlock some kind of achievement and someone will finally be proud of her.

He looks up from the sheet and fixes the Mandalorian with a steely glare. At least, he hopes he does. It doesn't appear to have much effect. "Two person job, is it?"

"Evidently."

He has a vaguely familiar voice. Perhaps only a familiar accent, because there's a peculiar non-human blurriness to the sound, and he speaks very slowly.

If it's important, Quinlan will remember it eventually. What is important right now is that Dooku has sent him _supervision._ It's insulting, frankly. He spends all this time insinuating himself in as a genuine verified Sith apprentice, loyal and uncomplaining, willing to commit atrocities and so on and so forth, and he's given a babysitter for a simple task? He wasn't even planning a dead drop of stolen documents or a report to the Council this time. He has no spy action on the to-do list today.

This isn't even a challenge, it's just irritating. And he is very wary of anything that implies Dooku is loosing trust in him. That trust is valuable.

So he buries his annoyance and smiles his brightest, most charming smile, which is a spectacular thing to witness. "If you say so! Be nice to have some company for the trip. Hey, you don't have a name, do you?"

"Not one you can use."

He clutches his chest, as though he's been mortally wounded by this insult. "I," he says, "Am mortally wounded by this insult."

The man does not say 'good,' and in fact nothing about his posture or comportment changes, but he manages to convey it regardless.

Damn. What's he done to piss him off, huh? Other than intentionally being irritating. The man's shape in the Force is difficult to find, because he shields in the blunt-force way that Mandalorians often do, the way that you learn if you haven't an ounce of force-sensitivity but you desperately hate the Jedi. It makes him cold and a little eerie in the Force; he ought to feel more alive than he does. It's like talking to a droid. But there _is_ something there, even if it has to come through the standard channels of tone-of-voice and body language; the man hates him. Seriously, deeply, inexplicably.

"Cool, cool," he says, continuing breezily. "I'm going to clear us for takeoff. You can, uh, stand there, I guess."

"Stop. Read the risk assessment."

"The _what?_ "

"It's a protocol document in which the potential hazards are assessed numerically and potential counter-measures to eliminate or mitigate the hazard are considered."

"Yes, I know, I know. I've encountered the concept."

The Mandalorian hums skeptically, which is rude. That sentence, sinking under its own weight, was clearly a struggle to say; he has to stop mid-word to give himself time to calibrate the next syllable and the sibilant fricatives blur together into a buzzing noise that appears to be the only one he can manage. It's an incredibly distinctive speech pattern; Quinlan wonders, vaguely, why he doesn't just get a properly-calibrated vocoder and speech synthesiser, since he's already got the bucket on.

He's _actually_ got a risk assessment, written out in crisp block-letter Basic, clipped under the mission briefing. Quinlan suffers a brief but horrifying flashback to the terrible two weeks when he had tried to take a class in operations management, back when he was under the illusion that he wanted to help run the Temple. It had turned out that he had just wanted to tell people what to do, and had not, in fact, enjoyed any practical part of the experience. Waking up to find himself on the council has been a recurring nightmare since he was unceremoniously removed from the class.

There is also an equipment inventory and a 'statement of objectives,' whatever that is, and some sheet of complicated risk-reward calculations.

"This," he says, voice faintly strained, "Is certainly very comprehensive. Well, I've read it."

He attempts to hand it back. This doesn't go well, because the Mandalorian presses the file back into his hand, and the brief brush of gauntlet onto the outside of his knuckles is enough to send an impression into the Force so strongly that he just allows it, picks it up again.

The flicker of sensation is a familiar one; the burn of plasma, the equivalent burn of muscles exhausted by sparring. And then the unfamiliar aspect: a flare of savage joy, uncomplicated enjoyment. Cheerful, unmitigated violence, stripped bare.

So far, Quinlan has managed to avoid that state. Shocked, off guard, he stands there and looks at that opaque glass and thinks, _Sith._

"I have copies," the Mandalorian says, and he really does sound like someone Quinlan ought to know. "One for use. One for records. You ought to do the same."

* * *

It's a struggle to sit calmly in the co-pilot's seat and not reach across the aisle and throttle Vos. Shake him until some answers come out. What does he think he's doing, being here, taking jobs from Dooku? At least Cody has the excuse that he's been kidnapped. Vos, as far as the records said when he read them before Rishi, is on an extended mission somewhere in Wild Space, but apparently he's here instead, being a traitor.

He remembers a fragment of text from the monograph he was reading this morning; he asks himself why he's angry.

Because... Because Quinlan Vos was Kenobi's friend. That's an explanation that makes sense. He's Kenobi's friend, and this is latent protectiveness, because how _dare_ he misuse that trust?

It's an explanation that makes sense. It has internal logic. But he suspects it's not complete. He asks the question again.

He's angry because _he_ liked Vos. They've worked together on occasion, or at least worked in proximity, and Vos cheerfully ignores the command structures he's outside of. It's difficult to dislike someone who so clearly likes you. He'd been impressed by his talent for suggesting plans that the tactics droids can't deal with, and he'd liked talking to someone without the thick veil of command hanging in between them. He'd thought he was funny. He'd also thought that Vos liked _him_.

He's angry because this feels like a personal betrayal. It isn't, of course. Vos owes him no loyalty, and he's too old to seriously believe that a nat-born with no stake in him is going to stick out their neck for him, or any clone, or the whole of them together.

He's disappointed because, despite all common sense and experience, he'd expected better.

There we go. He's found the fundamental thing, to be corrected. There are other things, under the surface, bitter and shifting, and he knows he should sit down and sort them out, put the feelings in order and in line, but he can't face it, not now. Instead he takes what he understands and focuses it, like light through a curved glass, until it's sharp and blinding, takes the place where all the anger collects and tucks it safe under his ribs to heat him from the inside out.

Vos looks away from the navigator screen and shoots him a startled little look; inside the helmet he feels the bone shift until it presses against the interior padding, made for the human skull instead of whatever he has now. Helmets are very useful. For one thing, they stop people from seeing all the teeth that he knows are just beginning to show, a threat display that shows now whenever he tries to smile.

The air circulating through the ship changes in texture as they begin to hit altitude, from the warm dry air of Serenno to what the cadets call 'vacuum air,' refiltered and humidity-controlled, faintly metallic, free of circulating life and smog. You can't actually taste the thin film of microbes that coats everything in-atmo, but there is nonetheless a compelling sensation in the lungs.

Long haul ships have their own cultures of circulating life, unique, to stop something else coming in and colonising the vents, but this craft is new and tiny, and it doesn't have any character yet.

Through the viewscreen, the light of the sun shifts in hue as they climb. The unfamiliar helmet's HUD flickers, as though it doesn't know what to highlight, and Cody fights back the urge to take it apart again. He'd spent two hours with no tools except the sharp edge of his nails trying to fight his way into the internal systems yesterday, and he's not keen to repeat the fruitless exercise.

It's a soldier's helmet, from the systems pre-installed. Targeting, an infrared setting he hasn't been able to turn on yet, something that's clearly designed to synchronise with a weapon that had been removed from the wristguards. But he thinks they might have been a medic, as well as a soldier; there are automatic vital signs indicators, presented without any contextualising data that might be useful to him as someone without any idea what the correct range for light-estimated blood pressure is.

It's too much data, and it clutters his field of vision. A vitals indicator attaches to a distant planet and urgently tells him it's dying until the primitive AI realises that the pattern of swirling storm clouds is not, in fact, a face.

Vos, who had claimed the pilot's seat by virtue of being the only person aboard who cared about it, keys in the coordinates for the Turuo star system and leans back, crossing his arms over his chest.

He wears his pauldrons over nothing at all, no flak vest and no _sleeves,_ and it's ridiculous. Cody hopes that the plastoid digs into his shoulders worse than his first backplate as a cadet had.

"You know where to get explosives on Turik?" he asks, apropos of nothing.

"Why would I?"

"I don't know, man, maybe you're from there. Maybe you've got a buddy. I'm sure we'll figure it out. One spaceport is pretty much like another, right?"

Cody wouldn't know. He's seen more emergency landings than spaceports. But he knows where to find something that will blow up nice and pretty in a Republic spacecraft hangar, usually because he's confiscating them.

"Why do you want explosives?"

Vos has a very expressive face when he wants to make his confusion known; he exaggerates things he hopes will be funny to distract from everything else he does. "You read the briefing, yeah? Database of geological surveys in the CIS, planet about to be taken by the Republic in about a week, QED, data too dangerous to be allowed to live?"

"You thought we were blowing up the building," Cody says slowly, "And you didn't think to bring any explosives with you?"

Honestly. It's flat-out insulting, that someone's been sent to stop him going rogue and that it's _him._ He considers that this may, in fact, be a punishment. It is, at least, more effective than running laps in the rain, or loss of rations.

"The Tur are besieged, they're not letting anyone on-surface without a full contraband scan and probably a bit of pointing and shouting besides," Vos says, as though this settles the matter.

Cody waits. "Do you know what—"

"Hang on, I ' _thought—'_ "

"—Do you know what blocks a contraband scan?"

Vos squints at him, off balance, not a man used to being spoken over. It's something that a clone learns to adapt to quick, and he has to admit that it's a little satisfying from the other side. "Smuggler's hulls," he suggests.

"Beskar."

"You're suggesting we smuggle explosives down your shirt? Well, it's your life, I guess—"

"I mean that you should probably have planned ahead. Just a little. I know it's not something that comes easily to Jedi."

Fuck. But Vos just looks vaguely insulted, instead of leaping up and demanding to know how he's known enough Jedi to know how they tend to handle logistics, or, more accurately, don't handle logistics.

"Roll it back a little. I _thought_ we were blowing up the building? What are we doing instead, then? Are you planning on blasting it from orbit through the planetary shields? Re-routing the river and flooding it?"

"We're turning the power off."

"What?"

"You signed the paperwork."

"I did no such thing."

"It's in the file I gave you."

Vos is beginning to look hunted, like a small herbivorous mammal that's just been made aware it's sharing an enclosure with a nexu. It's an expression that suits him.

"That's _paperwork,"_ he says, with a hint of a whine. "It never means anything. It's bureaucracy."

_Jetii._ Even if that status might not apply any more. He's unsure as to the Jedi order's stance on members who defect. Are they still Jedi? Just Jedi who are very bad at being Jedi?

The point of the paperwork is so that if something goes wrong, you know why. The point of the paperwork is so that someone's signed it, someone's taken responsibility. The point is that someone is responsible. For good outcomes and for bad ones.

The point of procedure is so that you know things are being done right. The point of paperwork is so that you know when they aren't.

It's something he takes pains to impress on his men. Ghost Company has one of the lowest accident records in the GAR, outside of combat situations, and part of that is that his men knows where things are, they know where the risks are, they know what the hazard procedures are, and they know that things are done.

It's dull, yes. And when it works right, you don't notice that it's doing any good. But it's something that you can do, apply a little effort to, and roll that boulder a little higher uphill, make things a little safer, make the world slightly more organised when the orbital bombardment is underway and the new rookies from Kamino have been through a dozen full-scale sims at best and they need something solid to stand on.

Some people, he knows, stake their idealism on ideas like freedom, or peace, or kindness. Those are all good things, but Cody believes in responsibility. He believes in accountability, and for accountability you need documentation.

So yes, he wrote the risk assessment and the statement of objectives and even the inventory. Even working for the enemy. So that if something goes wrong, there is a paper trail of who to blame. Who authorised this, who planned it. Him.

"Briefing said the objective was to wipe the _data,"_ he says, instead of all that. "Not to destroy the building or send a message to the planetary government or kill a few geologists. The Tur store their data in refrigerated servers, because they keep these things centrally, for some reason. If you turn off the cooling system, but you don't stop the locals making access requests, then the database is hit with a staggering number of requests per second and, as requests start coming back empty, people make the same requests again. The database heats up. Melts after a minute or two. No casualties, and it looks like an accident if we do it right. If we fuck up, it comes out in a month when the incident report is published."

"Huh," Vos says, something almost pleased to the corner of his mouth. He speaks with a vague tone, hypothetical, testing. "What about intimidation? What about the psychological side of warfare? Shouldn't we let them know that we were there and they couldn't stop us?

"Potentially valuable," Cody admits. There is a slick acid-feeling somewhere in his throat. He settles the back of his mind into the space where games of strategy live, where he can decouple victory conditions from casualty lists and be clear and ruthless in pursuit the same way that a starving man gains all kinds of clarity and viciousness confronted with a corpse. "But Turik is already besieged. Next week there will be boots on the ground. They have bigger problems than one explosion. Hell, groundlanders blow each other up all the time. It might be useful, but if we were going in for terrorism, we wouldn't be going after a geological resource centre, we'd be going after a centre of government. Or a hospital."

The acid wells. There is the taste of something in his mouth; not imaginary, not psychosomatic, but a real taste, something less viscous than water that coats his teeth and tastes so awfully, synthetically sweet that it loops right back to bitterness. He wants to bite something. He steps back from the cold place where the cruelty lives, or perhaps he doesn't, because he knows he's still checking the same lists of calculation, still tallying for the same reckoning.

"More importantly, though," he says, "The only objective we were given was the data. The rest is unnecessary. This is simplest. Easiest."

He thinks of how a droid will never put the boot in on a prisoner, unless it's ordered.

Vos is quiet, for a long time. Cody thinks of tapping the outline of his mind, to try to see what's shut him up. The whirl of the stars through the viewscreen briefly stills as the craft sets itself correctly on course; jump checks progress smoothly and predictably, and the ship slips neatly into hyperspace.

This engine is new. It runs smoother than any ship he's ever been in before.

There is a dead blade in his boot and a life support circulation artery through the metal besides his knee, just under the blinking array of switches; there is primitive life support in his helmet and Vos isn't even wearing sleeves. Like a memory, he can see how it could happen; they're in hyperspace, cut off from everywhere and everything, sailing in their silent bubble between the uncountable billions of totally unremarkable uninhabited star systems that lie between Serenno and their destination. There are so many holodramas about murder in hyperspace that even he, a man who had no access to uncensored media until he was fully-grown and commanding a battalion, has seen them.

It only needs a little force to break through the metal, a little extra push, and then the air circulation goes and total vacuum rushes into the cockpit, the artificial gravity fails, the heat shield collapses. The ship is un-armoured to avoid suspicion in Tur airspace, and sabotage on the part of the co-pilot is not a pressing concern for most consumer-market starship manufacturers. Cody has six minutes to live, thanks to his helmet seal; Vos only has two. In that spare four minutes he can operate the airlock to the cockpit with no trouble, and then he's alone in the hull with the humming engines and enough equipment to build a communicator, wire it to Republic frequencies, and send out an S.O.S...

And then what?

This is the problem with protocol. So long as you fit safely into its ways and means, your path is assured and easy, and your next action is simple. And then something goes wrong, and you find yourself in a situation you haven't planned for. He's a clever man, quick and adaptable and he knows it, but what he's learned to adapt to is battlefields, and his first and most familiar skill is violence.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen i know i KNOW i tagged ventress. and i promise u she shows up next chapter. u just have deal with a bit of cody and quinlan being bastards at each other first.

"How'd you figure that out? With the cooling and the overheating," Quinlan asks, eventually. He's flipped further into the file, and the thing is _detailed;_ there is an annotated blueprint of the building, some kind of circuit diagram, a list of references. "I certainly didn't know you could do that."

"I did research." The man sighs, the sound flickering into static through the vocoder; it's the most emotion he's seen from him so far, except for the eerie moment when he had bled into the Force for no visible reason, up to his neck and reeking of the Dark. "It's on the holonet. If you look."

"Where'd you look?"

"Book about Tur classical technology before they made first contact. Was only a couple generations ago. They still use their pre-Republic tech."

"How many did you read before you found that, huh?"

He says nothing for a second or two too long. His fingertips clack against the metal of the dashboard. "A few."

"I got the briefing yesterday afternoon."

"Yes."

Quinlan puts the file down, tucking it away with more care than he would perhaps have shown it before. "Did you get any sleep at all?"

It appears that he doesn't like it when someone asks _him_ interrogative questions, despite how much he likes to use them himself. "Enough," he says, something of the growl about his tone.

"There is a bunk back there, you know."

No response.

"Damn," he says cheerfully. "You're used to being in charge, aren't you? I'm not working _for_ you. I'm working with you. So I'm asking you, very nicely, and that's not a thing I do often, to kindly go make use of the bunk. For operational efficiency reasons, so I don't have to put you into the risk assessment."

He's expecting either that he'll reach for a lightsaber or flat-out ignore him, and he wouldn't begrudge him either response, but instead the Mandalorian sits in silence for almost a full minute and then stands and stalks out of the cockpit, bristling like an lothcat kit that doesn't want to be picked up.

After a moment or two, he shrugs and reaches for the music system.

Whoever he is, this man worked through the night because he didn't want to take the easy way out. He'd _called_ his solution easy, but it wasn't; it wasn't easy to find and it won't be easy to do. It relies on an obscure feature of a technology restricted to this star system, and on a projected plan of entry that would cover any evidence they'd ever been there. How do you stop the Republic accessing the information? Remove the information and _only_ the information. He'd never have thought of it.

(What he didn't tell him: this exercise is useless. It is, in effect, a jaunt out to another star system to take in the sights for all that it will achieve for the Separatist war effort, because the Republic would get no use out of geological plans. The Separatists would; they tell you where to plant the bomb to slide the city into the sea, how to trigger earthquakes, how to fill the air with ash and use the planet against its inhabitants. The Separatists are terrified of someone doing to them what they do to others.)

Quinlan has never learned this skill, this vital part of working for the enemy, of receiving your orders and following them, but not following them. Of achieving exactly what you're told to do, but killing no-one; of excising, surgically, all possible malice from the task, and leaving behind what's necessary. The problem with doing this is that you have to start off knowing exactly where the malice is.

He's always trusted the Council; he's never _had_ to learn this. He doesn't want to.

But he's never had an undercover assignment this long or this awful before.

It is, he thinks, time he learned.

War is awful. One of the reasons it is so awful is that it saps your ability to see that the world could be any other way; that there is any other path than the terrible one in front of you. It is one horrible, horrible thing after another, seen and done and not prevented in time, and you think: this is necessary. You take refuge in the knowledge that this is necessary. It is the only thing that helps, even a little; you turn, again and again, to the calculation: buy a hundred lives here at the cost of fifty there.

Only icy rationality reminds him of where the light is. This would surprise people, if Quinlan had ever explained this to someone. It doesn't jive with the picture he presents of himself, but neither do many other true things. The reality is that he is certain he is doing the right thing, being here, doing the horrible things so that he can smuggle secrets back to Coruscant, where people he trusts more than he trusts himself can prevent worse things, can try to end this.

So he accepts the horror. The end result of accepting horror is that you cease to see graduations. It all blurs together; if you must hurt people, does it matter how many, how badly? Of course it does. But to remind yourself of that is to remind yourself that you _are_ hurting people. It's easier to just do as you're told, and carve your way through via the path of least resistance; it means you think about it less.

When all you have is a lightsaber, the whole world begins to look like a man who will not put the gun down.

The Mandalorian hadn't. He'd thought through it all, and Quinlan simply cannot understand: the plan of attack is a masterpiece in its simplicity and in what it demonstrates about its author. It exhibits two things perfectly; first, a fanatical, single-minded concern, or possibly obsession, with preserving the lives and peace of mind of the Tur civilians, and second a comparable level of obsession with both the word and spirit of the orders he'd been given.

Quinlan wants to shake him awake and ask him to explain what the hell he thinks he's playing at, because he's known him for a few hours and he's already certain he's a good man, and certain that he's a terrible enemy to have. _You can't have both,_ he wants to tell him. _You can't do as you're told and keep the peace at the same time._ Why would he agree to the task at all, since he so clearly doesn't want to do it?

Then he remembers that poisonous bloom of the Dark from inside of his blank Force presence, and tries to think of something else to think of.

* * *

"Well. That made no sense at all."

"Can it, Vos." He says 'Vos' with a particular tone that he's never heard before, the final 's' stretching into something that doesn't sound quite human; he thinks of insects, the buzz of wings, guard drones. He doesn't like it; that's his name, he has the right to hear it said correctly, but he isn't certain that this is something that the man can help.

Now that he thinks of it, he can't remember ever giving him that name. Quinlan leans up against the branching tree and eyes the Mandalorian judgementally; he's slumped on a bench in the first breach of military-correct posture he's seen from him so far. Quinlan gets the strong impression that if he weren't here, he'd be firmly in the midst of a head-in-hands display of despair.

The man is clearly going through it. He'd be more sympathetic if he had any idea why, and if it weren't so inconveniently timed.

"You want me to run through what just happened, the way I saw it? Because I'm missing something."

The man scuffs a hand up the front of his helmet as though he's expecting to find a face there, and then jerks it away with a shake as it meets metal. Quinlan is reminded, against his will, of the old stories of the Sith Lords who wore masks bolted to their faces. What's the difference between a mask and a helmet? He'll ask a clone trooper, he supposes, next time he's on the right side of the great Galactic border.

He takes the silence as agreement.

"We were all the way though visitor's security and sitting pretty," he begins. "The scanners didn't even pick up on the lightsabers, so that was easier than anticipated. You were reading some display about Tur evolution, I think, and I was admiring the astonishingly pleasant planetary weather, because this was looking to be the nicest mission I've been sent on in a long time, despite the company. There was even a suitably adorable group of Tur younglings tumbling around the database atrium, squeaking. With me so far?"

The Mandalorian sighs. Quinlan gets the vague sense he's tempting violence.

"Next moment, there's a metal-coloured blur on my left and I turn to find that you've vaulted the safety railings, sprinted through the atrium steps at a turn of speed I'm impressed you can manage with all that dead weight, and burst through two of the security doors on your way into the restricted archives, where you terrified an intern archivist. Where we didn't need to be. Where we could probably have got into by asking nicely, if you'd particularly wanted to find something without kicking a keypad. Accurate?"

"Sounds about right."

"Cool. Why?"

On Turik, the sky is a pleasant shade of orange, and the white sun burns relentlessly. It's a dry planet, its natural water deep underground, and this park is, Quinlan suspects, a show of wealth; a sudden, booming manufacturing industry had catapulted Turik into the Galactic eye not long after the natives had achieved the basics of interstellar flight. It's been a hard adjustment for the people who aren't currently raking in the credits.

Off-planet green blooms everywhere, the irrigation tubes ostentatious and gleaming. It looks almost like Kiffex after the agricultural boom had came, except that in the Kiffex gardens everything had been streamlined for production and export, and this park is designed for show. Advertisement. The Mandalorian, in the midst of all the manicured trees, looks like he ought to be a statue, like if you left and came back you might find him with moss on his shiny head.

"I don't know," he says shortly. "I don't have an answer for you."

"What, you were possessed? Is that what you're telling me?"

"I," he says. "She was running."

"Who?" Quinlan asks. "The archivist? What?"

"She was running, and I could feel it." His voice is flat and expressionless, but he speaks slowly, as though he's trying to work out what the word is, trying to figure out the end of the sentence as he goes. "So. Pursuit."

Quinlan abandons his convenient tree and joins him on the bench, which apparently triggers some signal in the Mandalorian, who responds by immediately correcting his posture.

"You make yourself sound like a sighthound," he says, attempting to break the tension, and then regrets it immediately as distress blooms into the Force like ink in water.

The man laughs. It's not a nice sound, and it doesn't signify humour. "Chase instinct."

"Sounds pleasant."

"It was. For about three seconds, and then I realised what I was doing."

This is a very strange way for a man to talk about a part of himself. It is almost reassuring to spend time around a man with more deep-seated personal problems than he himself has. It happens so rarely. "Had that long?"

"I don't know."

Oh...kay.

"Know why?"

"No idea."

"Know anything?"

"If you want to find out more," he says, low and strained, "You could try running."

He thinks that translates to 'please stop talking, you're upsetting me.' So he does.

* * *

In his head, the archivist, running through the corridor to catch the elevator, is replaced by one of the Tur younglings who had been playing in the atrium.

He's been distracted ever since he stepped out of the ship into the bustling spaceport; weeks (he forgot to count days some time ago, and frankly has no idea how much time he's been missing) spent in the quiet, still halls of the keep on Serenno have left him unprepared to deal with this planet, its crowds of people, the constant noise of the Tur rumbling speech and the chiming of the bells they wind into their fur. A fluttering banner in the corner of his eye leaves him on edge; the smells of cooking desert-lizards, the light sparking and shattering in moving glass, the press of people.

He feels like the strings of an instrument, on the verge of snapping, the rough drag of the bow making him shiver in space. He hadn't been reading the display on evolution, though he'd have liked to; he was trying to stop himself from running. The Tur younglings had just been playing. That's all. Playing, and moving fast.

But the truth is that the impulse to chase hadn't come from the body; it wasn't that simple. It had come through the Force. Something in the Force had seen that woman (Not with his eyes! She'd been two walls away and yet he had known she was there, somehow—) and sent a jolt of adrenaline down his spine, electric, spurring him to movement.

More than adrenaline. Adrenaline is just a chemical. The Force operates where the mind lives, not the brain. That's harder to resist than the meat is.

Wearing a helmet makes it difficult to obscure where you're looking; it strips the ability to use peripheral vision. So he just turns his whole head and looks flatly at Vos, not hiding.

If Vos ran, he thinks he would receive instruction from the Force, not the body. That wasn't an idle joke, earlier. It was almost a threat. The archivist was force-sensitive, just a little, maybe not even enough for her to have noticed, but Cody noticed.

Earlier, Vos had slipped away into the crowd. Maybe a test, he'd thought, to see what he'd do if he thought he was unobserved, but he had known exactly where he was, without seeing him step away. It hadn't taken any thought. Like keeping track of his blaster in a communal bunkroom.

What does a vornskr hunt?

Oh.

He doesn't like that thought at _all._

Vos looks back at him calmly, mercifully silent, now. After a few seconds, he raises an eyebrow interrogatively.

"We'll need a new plan," he says, searching for a new topic of conversation, the previous one having seriously wounded him. "If we walk back in there, they'll be watching us too closely to get onto the maintenance level."

Vos doesn't seize the obvious opening to remind him how much he's fucked this up, and he's more grateful for that than he should be.

"Disguise?" he suggests. "I mean, if you take that bucket off and I find some other colour of face paint, we might fly under the radar."

"It would probably work for _you,_ but I have a feeling they might just recognise my face."

"An interesting tidbit of information. I'll remember that."

"Rest assured it'll do you no good."

Vos grins. "I'm very resourceful, when I put the effort in. You might be surprised. What about the vents?"

"Have you ever seen two astromechs playing bumper cars? Because that's the sound I'll make if you try to get me into a vent." He shifts his arms so that the pauldrons scrape against the rerebraces illustratively. "This is pre-Contact architecture. That means no Coruscant standard building regulations, which means no air vents you can fit a whole person into."

"Point taken." Vos leans back against the bench and sprawls expansively. A few hours ago he'd have taken it for relaxed; now he can see how his fingers curl and uncurl reflexively, the tenseness in the forced casualness of his crossed ankles.

Some kind of lizard flutters its way through the trees, the skin of its dactylopatagium making a sound like a collapsing leather umbrella. In the absence of aerial predators, they'd grown huge and slow and loud, protected by the fact that when not in flight they blend exactly into the dry brown earth. In the artificial park, they stand out, golden against the green.

"Listen," Vos says. "Neither of us want to risk going in the hard way, and if you walk in there again it will become the hard way immediately. You put a very well-annotated diagram into the file. I'm pretty sure I can disable the cooling mechanism myself. Sometimes, if you want a thing done right, you have to let the guy who can actually do it give it a go."

Contrary to common belief, Cody passed the command training segment on delegation with flying colours. It itches, because as reasonable as he's been, this is still a man whose first suggestion was _blowing up the building_ , still a man who defected from the Republic for reasons unknown and is actively working for the wrong side of this war, but he also makes a good point. Long practice sitting in planning sessions with Skywalker prevents him from actually saying 'ugh' out loud, but he self-indulgently permits himself to roll his eyes.

"Fine," he says.

* * *

His blaster sits on the tiny shipboard galley table, and Cody sits and contemplates it. He calls it 'his' blaster, but it isn't, not at all. This armour isn't his, this ship isn't his, the bright blade still on Serenno isn't his.

He's finally worked out why he was given a blaster that won't shoot. It wasn't just that he asked for it. It's wired into the helmet, somehow, he's realised; the targeting syncs up, but it relies on the medical subsystem. It won't shoot unless he aims it at a person.

So why does he carry it? Why did he go to all the trouble of bringing it onto this planet, slipping it past the contraband scanners, just so that he can carry it at his hip and refuse to use it?

Because he doesn't know how to be without a weapon. Because he doesn't know who to be without a weapon. Because he's carried a blaster every day of his life since he was a two and a half years old.

He wipes a smudge off the barrel and puts it away.

This is the loneliest he's ever been. Not now, specifically, but this experience. He wasn't made to work alone, not ever; he was built for group units. And he's _good_ in group units. It wasn't sharp shooting or tactics or even a natural facility with requisition sheets that made him Marshall Commander; it was his skill with people.

Or maybe not people in general. Maybe just his brothers.

That's what's so horrible about this; that this jaunt in the company of a traitor to destroy a database of valuable research, research that people put together with the goal of improving and understanding the planets they live on and the lives of the people on them, is... Almost nice. Almost pleasant, because someone who knows his name but not that it belongs to him stood in front of him and said 'I'm working _with_ you,' and he missed that. Missed 'with.'

And now he's alone on a planet that will, within the week, be part of Republic space; he has a hyperspace-capable ship and no supervision.

This is the opportunity he'd told himself, when he was first taken, that he was waiting for. He's not so stupid as to assume that the door is as open as it seems; he knows that Dooku would never have sent him if he believed it was possible for him to slip away. There's some leverage that Dooku thinks he has that Cody doesn't know about. But he doesn't know what it is, and you can't plan for an unknown like that, it's not a good enough reason not to try.

This was a test mission. The test was whether he would do as he's told, if sufficiently motivated, and the answer, the hateful, poisonous answer, is yes. Yes, this time. Yes, for this particular piece of leverage that slips between his ribs like a crowbar.

He's a soldier. He used to be a good soldier. He used to be the _best._ He's never learned how not to follow orders.

And now he thinks: can he do it? Can he leave Vos here and take off? Can he slip away into the black like a ship unmoored, go free and untethered and alone? Because he's realised something. He's realised that he can't go back.

What would he do? Call for pickup? Say, _they put me in a fine room in a fine castle and fed me fine food, but I didn't enjoy it, not at all, I promise. They tortured me, but only a little. I didn't tell them anything. Nothing at all, I promise. I'm loyal. I'm a soldier of the Republic. I'm as loyal as I ever was. I promise._

Say, _please fix me._ Say, _I've read the old books, the ancient scrolls on alchemy, the ones that don't exist anywhere else, and I know what was done to me. I can tell you about chrysalides and chimera. About the secrets of the ancient Empire. I think I know how to fix me. It will be expensive. It will need things you don't have._ Say, _I'm a clone, and I'm not entitled to medical care when I come back broken, but please, please, please._

Say, _I came to you broken. I came to you defective. I cannot be fixed. I don't want to be fixed. I don't think I can hide it any more, because now I know what it is that I was hiding._ Say, _things were done to me that were unjust. Things were done to me that were cruel. These things were done to me before I was taken. I will not let them be done to me again. I will not let them be done to any more of my brothers. I cannot work as I used to work._

Say _, I am different to how I used to be._ Say _, I have always been this way._

This morning, when he said his remembrances, he could remember three hundred and forty-nine names out of three hundred and fifty-seven. Or maybe fifty-eight.

* * *

They arrive back on Serenno in the early hours of the morning, and Quinlan is woken up in his bunk by the cloying feel of the planet in the Force, the wreathing clouds of the Dark.

Everyone here is hurt, all the time. It's how you get to be the kind of asshole that Dooku finds useful. If he spent his time leaning into that particular curve of the Force, he'd have given into the Dark already. Being here makes it easier to pretend that he is what Dooku wants him to be, which is why he takes any opportunity to get off Serrano that he can without endangering his cover.

It's almost as bad as Coruscant.

The Mandalorian lands them roughly; he flies the way he fights, which is to say he points himself in a direction and applies brute force until he's where he wants to be, free of subtlety, approaching such diverse obstacles as a nebula, a meteorite field and the ground head-on and hitting them until they give in. He has a very high estimation of the ship's mediocre shielding. He loves turbulence, or so Quinlan's experience suggests.

He thunders down the ramp, takes advantage of his position to ignore customs entirely, and proceeds into the keep and Dooku's office in a towering rage with Quinlan bobbing along behind him, mostly to stop him from walking directly through a wall if it got in his way.

"It's done," he barks. The Toydarian currently in audience, interrupted mid-way through a sentence, blinks owlishly; Dooku is entirely unfazed, because of course he is.

"Very good," Dooku says, raising one eyebrow as if to ask why they've told him this in person, instead of politely submitting a debriefing, waiting three to four working days, and never mentioning it again, it being, all things considered, a very minor task.

"Payment, as promised," the Mandalorian says, as if each word is costing him credits.

"Of course," Dooku says, with one of his distinctive smiles that implies precisely nothing good. "As promised."

He reaches into his own pocket, and Quinlan is briefly startled— _carrying cash?_ How startlingly plebian, etcetera—but it isn't money. It's a tiny, mass-produced, cheap plastoid-encased datastick, the kind that can't even be properly reformatted. The Mandalorian snatches it, like a snake striking, and turns on his heel, leaving as fast as he'd came.

"Right," Quinlan says. "Just reminding you that _I_ take payment in _credits_."


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tw here for mentioned head injury/concussion.

Dooku gives her the lightsaber, instead of him; a message, and not a subtle one. She curls her lip at it and eyes Cody skeptically.

"If one of you kills the other," Dooku says, with an air of finality, "I will kill the one remaining."

That said, he makes his exit, probably to spend his time more productively, for example practicing his speech-making, or fine-tuning the flare on his new cloak.

"That," Ventress says, "Was a lie."

"Clearly," he agrees. "Do you think he knows that?"

The corner of her mouth twitches up, her eyes narrow. He can't read her, not at all, and it puts him off-balance. On edge. He spends all his time on edge, these days.

The sunlight comes down through the windows, the dust glowing golden, like the sparks of blaster-fire. The arena they've been given is huge and empty and silent, sand in rusted colours moved by the wind into miniature dunes, vines crawling over the glass. Unused. What was this planet, before? Who built this place? Who did they think would be fighting here?

"Should I give this to you?" Ventress asks, the characteristic edge of mockery in her voice familiar. "Or should I just see what all that shiny armour does against a lightsaber?"

He knows the answer to that one already. The answer is: It holds up better than you'd think. It holds up worse than he'd like.

"You could," he says. "But I don't think you'd learn much, if you did that."

"You think I have anything to learn from you?"

"That's why you're here, isn't it?"

"I think I'm here because my lord wants you hurt."

He almost wants to laugh. "You're here," he says, "Because you were ordered to be."

She tilts her head back and makes a rumbling noise, a warning. But he's never been good at judging threats.

"You don't even own your lightsaber," she says, low, as though she's telling him a secret, as though it's kind of her to let him know. The blade flares to life in her hand, washing her white skin in the ruby glow and throwing strange shadows. "He has to ration it out to you, like treats for a dog."

"I don't own anything," he replies, calm, unbothered. It's true. It's always been true. Everything he has is on loan, including his life. It doesn't upset him any more.

This is fine. This is better than Vos, even, because Vos was almost a friend, once. Ventress has never been anything more than an enemy. Enemy isn't the right word. She's more like a natural disaster, or a hungry animal. She doesn't seem to kill for any reason he can see, just because there are troopers in her way. Just because she's built for killing.

It makes it easier for him to fit her into his head. He doesn't have to try to understand her.

She looks at him solidly for a moment, the way her jaw locks visible. "It really isn't yours," she says, with slightly less venom, like it surprises her. "The crystal."

"Never was."

She makes a sound of disgust, emphatic, her teeth on display, and with a sharp jerk of her arm sends the hilt flying in his direction. Her own blades are burning in her hands before he can catch it, but the Force lends him speed; with a burst of exultation, a flame of adrenaline-joy, he brings it up just in time to catch the very first strike.

He can feel the same sunburst feeling in her.

He used to think he didn't touch the force on the battlefield, that it was something he only allowed himself when he was safe. He knows better now. This—the familiar singing of danger, the glory of a chance to test yourself, the way his blood rises, the way his limbs quicken and time slips slower and the colours glow brighter—this is the Force, and it always was.

It is many things, but it is also this.

* * *

A passage taken from the manifesto of Apprentice A'haren, circulated widely on layer 79 of Dromund Kaas before the layer was demolished and population culled in the 2nd Suppression of the Underlayer Wars:

_Do not speak to me of deserving! Never speak of earning! Nothing is owed to you. Not joy, not life, not pain, not a future, not a past. We reject debt. We reject promises. We reject owning. We reject payment. We reject righteous._

_These things are tools, and when a tool is raised against a person it becomes a weapon. So make war. We reject the order of things._

_How can you be a Sith if you will not take what you want? Take it! Take it for no reason! Take it only because you want it. Nobody is able to prevent us from taking. Nobody has this authority over us. Nobody has the right to tell us what to have. We say that we will not work for what we want. We will not pay in effort. We will not pay in blood. We will not pay in money._

_We want our lives. We want our joy. We want our freedom. We want our bodies. We want our families. We want our weapons. We want our honour, and we want it on our terms. We want our dignity. We want everything that was denied to us. We want everything. We intend to take it._

* * *

Soresu is not made for him. It is, he can admit, probably a fine form, and he admires General Kenobi's command of it, but it is primarily a defensive form. He doesn't wish to overstate himself, but the facts of the matter are that he is _already_ resilient. He prides himself on his sturdiness, his steadiness, and he is also clad from head to toe in beskar; as marvellous as Soresu is in the matter of deflecting attacks, he'd rather take a few strikes in exchange for landing a few of his own.

And he isn't being taught Soresu, nice as that would be. He's just pulling out images from his memory, thinking through the things that the General had told him, and putting them into a kind of shape that makes sense. He can practice what he has, he can improve and extrapolate, but there's nothing like practical experience and it is rapidly becoming inadequate.

Time spent watching someone else is valuable for a bright beginner, but the further he follows this, the less useful it gets, the wider and more obvious the holes become.

And he simply does not like Makashi. It gets on his nerves. It feels like a system dreamt up by a holodrama, meant more to create cinematic set-pieces than for survival; it's graceful and efficient, but it's _too_ graceful, too self-conscious. Too much psychoanalysis. Yes, he's heard that a duel is a conversation, but there has to be a limit.

("What have I told you," Dooku asks again, and Cody, disarmed with the blade under his chin, has no answer for him. He wasn't trying to talk; he was trying to survive.)

But Makashi is what he's getting.

Thankfully, Ventress seems to be of similar mind to him; if a duel is a conversation, then theirs are mostly monosyllabic with the occasional scream. She saves her threats and mind-games for the lull between attacks.

He's still loosing consistently, but this isn't a surprise any more. It would be stranger if he weren't.

She's a _long_ person, all these Jedi seem to be, at least in comparison to him, and he's feeling keenly the differences in their reach as he backs away again, trying to catch two blades at once, the vibrations of the impact running up his hands and buzzing in his shoulders. His defence is adequate at best, but both she and her lord are relentless, returning and returning, and he has no opening just because he cannot afford to break his guard even for a moment to strike out.

What does Makashi say that means about him as a person? Probably a great deal, but he is not interested in finding out.

A few months ago he would have looked at himself, at the speed and strength with which he moves, and been amazed. He still is. His fighting suffers from the fact that a part of his brain is always set aside to watch in wonder at the things he is almost able to do and to marvel at the experience of the Force, the way it lights him up from the inside out.

Another strike comes, high; he catches it solidly and only then remembers to twist away, because unlike Dooku, she's got another blade, and the only purpose of the high attack is to move his guard away from the centre of his body.

The helmet's vocoder produces a tangled snarl of static, processing whatever raw sound he'd made as the plasma curled and burned up the edge of his ribs, under his raised arm.

This specific pain is familiar, now. The surface cut is the worst. If she'd only taken it deeper, it would have cut deeper into the flesh than the superficial nerves map, but she didn't; she'd slipped behind the edge of the chestplate and just barely tapped his side, enough to tell him that she could have cut him in half without any effort at all.

She steps away, and the undersuit shifts uncomfortably, the new slice in the padding loosening the hold; he's incredibly, uncomfortably aware of the cold rush of air against his back where a breeze pushes against the tear.

She likes this, he thinks. She likes letting him live. She likes that it's her choice.

But she's getting progressively more annoyed, because if she has to waste her time on him, he could at least be a good opponent to make up for it.

"Stop watching the blade," she says, with the tone of a catchetism; he blinks at her in confusion.

She rolls her eyes, huge in her lean skeleton head. "Your head moves around all the time, it's like watching an astromech droid swivel. I can tell you're trying to track the blade. It's a waste of your time."

"Oh, I just let you swing away without paying any attention, then?"

The tattoos around her mouth warp with her expressions. He's never seen patterns like that; as far as he knows, the GAR isn't even sure what _species_ she is. "Listen to the Force, instead," she says, her blade tracing strange patterns in the air as she gestures in irritation. "It's faster than your eyes." It isn't an explanation, but none of this stuff is. It's all wrapped in layers of obfuscation, metaphor, and things he's expected to have learned as a child but didn't.

It... Almost makes sense.

Explanation rendered, she doesn't bother to give him time to regroup before springing back at him; he's disarmed twice more before he can pull himself together enough to really try it.

It's nerve-wracking. Listening to the Force doesn't just mean relying on it to tell you where the blade is coming from; that isn't fast enough. But if you can get to the point where you cease to analyse an impulse before you let it move you, then the Force makes itself known in movement, and it almost pulls you out of the path on its own. It doesn't ask you to leap; you just find yourself in the air.

To get there, you just have to allow your body to behave like static, signal noise amplified and moving the limbs. You have to give up control.

It's unpleasant, it's disconcerting, it's like running on a landslide, and it—well. It works.

The crack and hiss of impact is constant, like percussion. A lightsaber really is a thing of the Force, far more than it is a physical weapon, the kyber a heavy thing that bends space around it like a gravity well. When she says that the saber doesn't belong to him, that's what she means—he works with it, but it goes grudgingly, tuned to someone else's frequency. It doesn't have anything to tell him. Hers are delighted to be used; his is only burning because his thumb is on the activation switch, and wishes to be left alone.

It doesn't want to work, but it _will._

He strikes out low into a lunge, the momentum carrying him under the crackling arc of her right hand, and then lashes out and finds her other blade, so close to the hilt of his blade that he can feel the heat through his glove. If it were a dead blade, the edges would slip and scrape and he'd loose his fingers, but it's not, so the electromagnetic pulse of the plasma holds steady, friction and arcing electricity. He wrenches, brutal, the muscles of his shoulders screaming, and beats the blade back and over his head. Catches her other blade with her own.

Now he's too close, off-balance from the advance, and he can't move back without freeing her blades—but the Force doesn't push him back. It's like a thump between his shoulder-blades, saying, _forward, again._ So he goes. He hasn't got the leverage, not from here, he can't brace against the sliding sand—but he can brace against _her._ He sets his shoulder, leans hard against the hilt in his hand, knows that she'll push back harder.

It's not steady ground. But it's a point to push against. With that fulcrum point, he's free to push up on his forward foot, swing up and off the ground, let his whole body go tight and coiled, one long horizontal line in the air. Lets the momentum come rolling down from the hilt of the saber to his legs where the muscle is strongest. Lands his back foot firmly on her stomach and shoves.

Like kicking in a door.That, he's certain, is going to hurt in the morning.

She smiles even as she staggers back, eyes alight, and he knows he's making the same expression. He doesn't give her time to recuperate, just launches himself at her bodily, taking her down to the ground, familiar ground, where the saber begins to grow obsolete compared to the body, the bone and meat.

Clone troopers _like_ to fight. They like to throw each other around, get acquainted with the training mats, pick each other up and haul; Cody's always liked it more than shooting. He's always been good at it.

And she's good, too. Different than he would have expected. The Jedi practice hand-to-hand, he knows, but he's seen it, and it's like their bladework; clean, pared-back, elegant, designed by someone in a sprung-floor training room. The Jedi lack the essential formative experience of Alpha-17 going spare, or the equally formative but less fondly-remembered experience of, for example, Bric.

Ventress doesn't grapple like a Jedi, and she doesn't grapple like a trooper; she hits the sand and brawls like a cornered nexu, rolling and twisting, using her elbows and knees and the sharp points of her nails. There's nothing recognisable in it; he suspects she may have had no training in this at all, just natural talent and necessity.

He becomes very, very grateful for his codpiece.

They roll some half dozen times, the delicate balance of victory tipping and shifting like a boat in a storm, impact jarring down his spine. His head feels rattled, dizzy. She almost dislocates his left arm; the plates of his boots leave deep scratches in her legs that bleed onto the sand. She kicks his shin hard enough that something makes a sick crunching noise and prickling cold-hot pain shivers through his entire nervous system; he almost gets a hand on her neck.

This, he realises, is the first time someone's touched him since they realised he wasn't going to give them any information.

He hits the earth again, catches the impact across his shoulders as he was trained and absorbs the dizzying hit to his solar plexus; she grins at him with blood on her temples, and he returns it, teeth pressing against each other, mandibles pushing against the inside of the helmet. The now-familiar sweet-acid taste is in his mouth again, dripping down into his throat.

_You,_ he thinks, _Once stabbed a brother from behind and made him pull himself off the blade. I saw it on the security holos afterwards. He was judged too wounded to be worth treating. He wasn't even in your way. You just wanted to watch him hurt._

He plants an elbow and arches up. The crack of metal and bone makes the helmet ring like a bell; white bursts across the visor-screen for a moment. Falling stars. She staggers back with a cry, a new wound across her forehead, and his head aches but he would bet real caf that she can't even _see_.

The opening lets him scramble to his feet, call the saber back to his hand from where it had been lying in the dust, and when she opens her eyes one has a pupil blown wide. She stands at an angle, as though she can't remember which direction the ground is in, and he doesn't give her time to remember, just lurches forward again.

* * *

The new apprentice comes at her again, blade in hand.

The problem with his fighting before was that he wasn't using the Force. Now he's practically bleeding it, Dark like a gravity well. It's comforting. Feels like home, the fact that he's trying to kill her.

They have, she thinks, abandoned the pretence of sparring. It was never friendly, but for a while there she was almost attempting to do as she was ordered and _teach_ him.

This is what it was always going to be. He is the competition, an usurper of her rightful place, and there will only be one winner. Only one survivor. That's the way it always is.

That is what it means to be a Sith. All the rest of the code is only noise; this is the fundamental core. You win or you die. The first and greatest enemy of the Sith are the Sith.

The world warps and sways, her brain shaken in her skull. In the glass windows that surround the arena she sees the reflection of something huge, watching, a thousand yellow eyes and teeth, teeth, teeth. She ignores it.

He strikes, testing; she blocks, solidly, and borrows his own tactics as he does with hers. This isn't something she was taught, not by the Jedi, not by Dooku, but something she figured out on her own as a child: aim for the wound. Her boot hits his ribs, the only exposed skin she can see, right where the undersuit is cut through and the plasma burn is raw and red-white. He jerks, like a man electrocuted, and his left leg crumples under him where she'd tried, earlier, to dent the beskar.

She falls down heavily onto him, gravity and the nausea-liquid roll of her balance more than any intention, but she rallies and seizes the opportunity, pushes his head hard into the dirt and plants a knee over where she knows a bruise is forming, pins him where he thrashes.

She wants to see him bleed. She wants to see his _face._

She presses her forearm down on the back of his neck, makes him strain for breath, and with her other hand hooks her fingers at the rim of the helmet. Draws it out.

One eye is pressed into the sand; the other glares balefully up at her. _Clone,_ she thinks, and then his face opens outwards and he snaps at her fingers with more teeth than should fit in that space. Hinged, outlined with bone, split into sections like the mouthparts of an insect but toothed like a vertebrate, the inside of the mouth red with blood; two black mandibles, serrated and vicious, dripping something that absolutely is not saliva.

Chimera.

There is a line, thin and pale against the brown of his skin, diagonal on the nape of his neck, just below the line of his hair.

Her breath goes still in her lungs.

She relents on the pressure for a moment, lets him gasp for air, pushes with her fingertips through the curls of his hair to where his spine disappears into the bulb of the skull.

The people who designed those things didn't want them removed. If you try to follow the insertion path, the spindle filaments will trip and the incendiary will blow. So the surgeons have to get clever, go in sideways, to get it out. It's messy. It's designed to be.

There is no exit wound.

She entertains, briefly, the idea that this is how the Republic retains their soldiers. But her lord does not tolerate disloyalty in his soldiers, and would never have allowed it to remain, if so. She imagines also that the Republic, if they had the ability, would detonate those clones gone missing in action as a matter of routine, to prevent them giving away sensitive information and discourage desertion; it's what she would do. Only logical. And, since his head remains attached to his shoulders...

There is only one option for whoever is on the other end of the receiver frequency.

Something strains inside her, something old and buried. There is a crack in everything, a crack all through the universe, and all the spinning planets only facets of the break; she has known this all her life, and now she knows it again. Now, for once, she thinks it may be a wound, and not simply a break in an inanimate thing.

"Stay still," she says. She means it to come out a threat, but it refuses.

He thrashes again, because of course he does, but he's exhausted and in pain. So is she. Eventually, he goes still.

She refuses to wonder what he's thinking.

This is the very first thing she learned to use the Force for.

A slaver's chip is not an evil thing. It should be, but it isn't; it is a machine, a thing made of metal and silicon and incendiary chemicals, and a thing without a consciousness cannot be evil, is hard to feel in the Force. Chemicals have no morality attached just because they happen to be particularly volatile. What does leave a mark in the Force is the intentions of the people who designed it, made it, installed it, because they did so with intent, with conscious presence and decision and awareness, and it is this mark that she chases now.

It's difficult to find, not directly under her fingers where she expects to find it, non-standard in design. Not over the skull. Under it.

It makes no difference, she knows, when it goes off. Not to the bodies.

She is very, very good at breaking things. The Force tells her how. She breaks this thing.

He convulses. That impossible mouth contorts, the mandibles snapping, bleeding venom; his open eye rolls, unseeing, the pupil fixed. Then he goes still, breathing again after a moment. Slow, deliberate. Watching her.

That shouldn't happen. She's done it enough times to know. It should simply quietly cease to operate, the slaver chip being its own self-contained, sealed machine, no contact with the nervous system. Maybe she's out of practice; it's been a decade.

"Listen," she says, the words rasping, dragged out of her. "Listen to me."

She feels possessed, like there is someone else piloting her body, thinking her thoughts for her. Maybe just haunted. The ghost of her, once, a little girl, dead.

She tells him what she was once told. She has no idea if she still believes any of it.

* * *

An excerpt from the seminal work An Apprentice's First Primer on Warfare, as written by the Marcher Lord of the Empire, Darth Simische, in the 27th century of the Hosnian reckoning and translated from the original Kausu by an unidentified apprentice:

_You have enemies. Yes, even you, young reader, unskilled and unimportant._

_The acquisition of enemies is unavoidable and its avoidance is not desirable. You have enemies by virtue of what you are; you have enemies by virtue of who you are; you have enemies by virtue of what you do. When you are aligned and directed in the Force, all three are the same and indistinguishable, and so your enemies are all the greater._

_Young reader, I say 'by virtue,' and I mean it. To have an enemy is a fine thing, a good thing, an indicator of success. A Sith that goes into the world with the intention of never upsetting anyone is shirking their duty. Seek to collect those enemies who object to what you do, not what you are. They are more inventive._

_This turning universe and the people in it may be hostile to your existence. If you do not know this yet, you will come to know it. This implies nothing of you. You cannot claim superiority because there are forces that wish to see you powerless and suffering. You can only claim superiority when you have defeated those forces._

_When you have an enemy, there are many choices._

_The cleanest is to strike swiftly and forcefully, and in this manner remove them. The benefits of this approach are obvious. The risks are numerous. You must be wary of overconfidence; it is tempting to underestimate the forces of the enemy, and find your decisive strike failing, and so you are thrown into continuous battle against a well-matched force, which has been the downfall of many great Lords through attrition of resources and of the mind._

_Another choice is to defend yourself, either by concealment or by armaments. Find yourself a fortification and make yourself impervious to attack; make yourself invisible. This is tempting. It brings security, that most basic need of living things. We like to live safely. But there is no living safely. This is what living means. When you choose defence, you limit your own action, you sabotage your own potential; you secure your own failure, because the enemy wishes for you to suffer, but also to be rendered unable to act._

_Consider also the virtues of the fine balance between offence and defence, and what the difference is. If you can walk the line, I recommend you try it. Most people cannot. There are a thousand shades of colour between attacking and defending, and each is its own strategy. Maybe you will learn a few._

_There is a final choice that is rarely remembered. It works like this: greet your enemies like friends. Thank them for what they do for you; thank them for making you stronger. Show them your weaknesses. Teach them how you think. Let them come close to you. This, of course, is idiocy. But a marvellous thing begins to happen, if you survive. When your enemies strike at your weaknesses, you learn to defend them. They cease to be weaknesses. When they learn you, they learn of the flaws in your thinking; they will see the cracks in your plans that are invisible to you, and they will show you where they are. This is purifying. It is a fire that burns clean through you, and it leaves you stronger. There is nothing better for an ideology than an enemy who understands it. It excises the decay, and leaves behind only what works. If it survives._

_If it does not, then did it ever deserve to?_

The accuracy of this translation is disputed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tfw you assume your apprentices will duel with lightsabers like civilised people and instead they immediately start rolling around on the floor kicking and biting like two foxes in the wheely bin outside the pizza place


	9. Chapter 9

"Kote," Seventeen says, closing the door behind him and elbowing a mop out of the way to squat down to meet the kid's eyes, "Why are you hiding?"

"I'm not hidin'," he says, and seems to mean it. "I'm making plans, Alpha."

"What's the plan for? Next training engagement?"

"No," he says, distracted, chin on his knees, contemplating the floor. "I've had that one for months. We're going to feint a pincer movement and use that to herd Squad Nine into the tunnels and gun them down there. I'm trying to plan how to not be decommissioned."

Oh.

He doesn't ask stupid questions like 'why.' He knows why. He just stays quiet, because if 2224 didn't want to talk he would have left already.

"Veer never came back to his bunk," he says, eventually, and—Seventeen knew this was coming. He just didn't think it would be this soon after loosing 2226.

They didn't _ask_ him. He'd been bracing for them to tell him they were going to cull the squads again, and he'd been prepared to argue, prepared to fight for 2217. But they'd just taken him.

"Any ideas?" he asks, because he doesn't have any. Not a whisper.

"No," 2224 says. "They took Veer because of what he did, because he's too mouthy and he's too slow. And Neu died because he failed. But if they take me it's going to be because of what I am, not what I do. I don't..."

That's not true. 2217 can't help it, can't quiet down his mouth, and that's _who_ he is. Who he was. 2224 draws an easy line between being and behaviour, but Seventeen's seen a lot of changes made to the genetic template, and he knows it's not that simple, that being makes behaviour and the other way around.

He doesn't even know why 2224 thinks they'll come after him next. He's _bright._ He's hard to be around, sometimes, because Seventeen looks at the things he does, the way he sets his mind to obstacles, the way he drags his brothers forward with him as he advances, and thinks, _this is all you're ever going to get._

But they're all afraid of going to the pods one night-shift and then never climbing out again. The longnecks, he thinks, do it on purpose; it is an incentive. Seventeen knows all about incentives. That the fear is deliberate doesn't make it not real.

There is something very cruel about the fact that he'd been taught the Resol'nare. _Defend your family,_ he thinks. _Raise your children right._ But 2224 is not his son, just a cadet. Not even really a child, just child-shaped. Just unfinished. They'd shown him the way, but he had no ability to follow it.

He pulls himself out of his own head, assumes the clean, cold shape that he presumes the Kaminoans must think in, puts yet another layer of unattachment between him and 2224. All right. What is wrong with him?

"What you did six months ago, on Myrkr," he says. "Never do it again."

"But," the kid says, blinking, "But when I told you, after, you said I did the right thing."

"What's right is following orders."

"But Alpha-9 was _wrong!_ It was a stupid plan! We would have been seen as soon as we got into the valley and then we'd all have _drowned!_ "

"And if you pull a stunt like that again, they'll mark you down as a mutineer. You can't just go haring off on your own because you don't like your orders."

"It wasn't that _I_ didn't like them," 2224 mumbles into his knees. "I was put in charge of the squadron, Alpha. And that means looking after them. If it'd just been me, sure, I'd have gone with Nine. But it wasn't. And we got the job done like we were told, what does it matter how we did it! What's the point in being in Command if you can't keep your people safe?"

It's not a rhetorical question. He's looking up with those huge eyes, tearful, and _how_ did Seventeen not notice this problem before? He'd been proud of the kid. He'd thought he was doing well.

Seventeen has no answer for him.

"Listen," he says. "Listen to me. You're going to go through training and you're going to test onto Command track like we've been talking about. You're going to do good. You're going to get your general and your company and they're probably going to be a good one. And you're going to do the job you were made to do. And one day, your general, or some nat-born admiral, or a senator, or maybe your commanding officer, whichever vod that shapes out to be, is going to tell you to take fifty men and walk right into the valley down the obvious approach. You'll know what you knew on Myrkr and you're going to know it's going to be an ambush, and you'll tell them like you told Nine, and just like Nine, they're going to tell you to go ahead and do it anyway. And what are you going to do then, Kote?"

2224 is still and silent. Outside, the storm roars, the crash of the waves violent. Lightning strikes close by. Seventeen's skin prickles as static rolls through the facility.

"I'll shoot them," he says, calm as anything.

He doesn't look scared any more; he looks sure. Seventeen wants to pick him up and shake him, shake some sense into his fool head.

"No," he says. "Wrong answer. You'll take fifty men and walk right on down into the valley. Maybe you die there. Do you know why?"

2224 says nothing, just watches, and there aren't tears in his eyes any more. The light comes down oddly, slants through brown irises and turns them pale, eerie yellow. The storm's gone quiet, for just a moment, as they often do, a lull in the fury to gather strength before it tears an aquaponics platform apart.

"Because that's the only way you'll have lived long enough to get there in the first place," Seventeen says. "You obey orders, or you die. If you take your men and refuse to go down into the valley, you haven't saved them. You've only put off their death for a couple days until you can be put up in front of a tribunal. Every extra day is borrowed time, and it's not real living, because you're living as something else. You're a trooper, Kote, and that means you were meant to do what you're told. If you're not doing that, not fulfilling your purpose, you're not you any more. You're something else. The good soldier's dead, and there's something else that carries on living."

2224 stares at his own hands for a very, very long time, and then looks up, looks directly at Seventeen. It's like being looked at by a tunnelling electron microscope. It feels like he's been hollowed out, the insides of him pulled out and twitching on the floor.

"I think," 2224 says, his voice coming as though from far away, through water, cold and quiet, "That you should leave me alone and go back to your patrol."

Seventeen should leave him alone and go back to his patrol.

Yes. That's right.

* * *

The Mandalorian's name, at least as far as the housekeeper droid's internal memory storage knows, is either Vornskr or Project Vornskr, and both of these options are, in Quinlan's humble opinion, deeply concerning. He doesn't know if it's a surname or a first name. Both imply a failure of judgement at some point in the recent history of his family.

There is no name on the door to his suite, but most of the rooms in this part of the keep are unlabelled, presumably for purposes of plausible deniability if the inhabitants go missing. This is one of the few upsides of working undercover here: the digs are nice and the food is impeccable.

There is no answer when he knocks, but he knows the man's not left the keep; he got into the access logs, and it seems like he _never_ does.

He is dubious on the usefulness of this particular task. Yes, understanding the enemy is useful, and yes, another Sith on the battlefield could be a serious problem for the Republic forces, but he seriously doubts that Vornskr is going to let Quinlan get close enough to hurt him.

This is a fundamental flaw in the strategy of the Sith: they have no non-selfish interest in each other. A Sith can be deeply invested in another human being—a master to an apprentice, for example—but that investment is dispassionate. They don't truly care for each other. A Sith only wants another to be successful or to be happy when it is useful to them, and if it ceases to be useful, they cease to care. There is no love and there is no compassion.

Quinlan has trained a padawan, joyfully and proudly and with a stunning amount of stress, and he can't even _imagine_ what it would mean, to train an apprentice as the Sith do.

The Rule of Two, it's called. It will, he thinks, be their downfall in the end; it sets them up to fail. You cannot teach someone, truly, if you fear them, and you cannot learn if all the time you know you will someday have to kill your teacher. Quinlan knows what Ventress doesn't: he knows that Dooku doesn't truly see her, or Quinlan, or Vornskr, as students. He sees them as tools. As weapons. The way that Dooku's master, in turn, sees him.

So the _last_ thing that Quinlan wants to do is encourage them to reach out to each other. Let them pull each other down, as far as he's concerned. Let them all go down together.

But the Council wants to know who the new threat is, and Quinlan has to provide them with an answer. He rocks back on his heels, looks surreptitiously up and down the corridor, and sets his ear to the door. No sound. But... He reaches out in the Force, quietly.

It isn't easy to find people like this, even at close range; it sounds easy, because a life is so _bright_ in the Force, but the Force isn't necessarily bound by patterns like space and time and geometry. So you have to impose your own understanding of space and distance onto it, and still it will sometimes only be able to tell you that there _is_ someone, someone nearby or maybe in another star system and just thinking about you; it'll tell you all sorts of things about them, if they're angry or delighted or hungry, but not where they are. Some Jedi have a skill at it, or more accurately more diligence in their practice, but he doesn't.

If it were as easy as a map superimposed on the universe with all the people lit up in the Force as tiny moving dots, then the war would already be over, because they'd be able to find the Sith Lord wherever they lurk on Coruscant. But they can't.

But this time he is able to keep hold of it, and he _thinks_ that Vornskr is his rooms, doing some lurking of his own. Still.

He knocks again, harder this time, and the flicker of slinking Dark twists in a way that feels a great deal like a resigned sigh, and yeah, he's _pretty sure_ it's him.

It's another minute before he actually opens the door, because the man loves to make himself into an inconvenience.

The man says nothing, just stands, the blank face of his helmet staring, one hand on his hip and the other on the doorframe. He is _oddly_ dressed—boots and beskar up to the waist, the kind of aggressively tactical gear that it makes no sense to wear alone in your rooms, and then a luxurious-looking green silk shirt, buttoned to the neck, with pauldrons and unnameable assorted pieces of metal strapped to his beshirted arms. Barehanded, no chestplate. Skin at the neck. It's the most of him that Quinlan has seen so far, and it feels particularly absurd to put that helmet on over that particular shirt, thin with embroidered trailing vines.

Quinlan doesn't like his chances of winning a staring contest against a T-visor, so he breaks the tense silence with a smile. "Hey, man," he says, because good cheer is easy to fake. "How you doing?"

"Adequately," Vornskr says, voice like a bar of lead. "Why are you here."

"I'm great, thanks for asking," he breezes. "I just thought I'd swing by, say hi properly, maybe get to know you some, if you're going to be sticking around, how's that sound?"

"Bad. Leave."

"Aw," he sighs, theatrical. "What've I done to piss you off, huh?"

Without visible eyes or eyebrows or in fact any expression at all, the man referred to in internal documentation as Project Vornskr manages to glower. It's very impressive. Happily, Quinlan has had extensive practice in the art of being stubborn and inconvenient until people give in. And, he's found, if you act like people are going to be polite and reasonable and friendly, and if you do it relentlessly, and do your best to seem sincere, eventually a good proportion of them will in fact step up and _be_ polite and reasonable and friendly. The rest, well, that's why he carries the saber.

He's going to need a really good excuse to keep coming back, because showing up to annoy his way in is only going to work the first dozen times, and Quinlan suspects he's going to continue to be a problem for quite some time.

He catches his shoe in the door as it closes, and smiles. Then the man stops with his hand on the edge of the wood, his nails curved and black and shining, threatening by shape and design to leave scratches in the varnish. The black glass turns back to Quinlan.

"Kiffar," he says, blunt, a description. It's vaguely offensive. "Psychometry?"

Why, he _has_ been doing his research. "Maybe just a little," Quinlan lies, easy. "When I'm in the mood."

"Come in."

Quinlan is just overcome with curiosity.

There is something wrong, he decides, with the mind of a man who keeps his sprawling desk so terrifyingly neat that the placement of his flimsi and styluses must require a straight-edge and set square, and then proceeds, as far as Quinlan can see, to sleep not on the lushly appointed bed but in a pile of furnishings on the floor, in front of the windows.

Books are piled on every available surface—no, he thinks, that's not true. The rows of datapads are arrayed in patterns he would bet come specifically recommended by the manufacturer for efficient ventilation of components and pressure distribution, and the frankly excessive numbers of disturbingly organic paper-pulp archive books are kept carefully off the floor, off surfaces with coatings that might transfer, away from ledges, sharp edges, or any possibility of spills. There are pictures in frames, and they have all been turned to face the wall; there is a small pile in one corner of the room of what were clearly intended to be art objects and which the occupant just as clearly scorns.

The man shuts the door behind him, and the back of Quinlan's neck prickles. He contents himself briefly with the knowledge that he can just jump out of the window if he needs to, which is something he always enjoys, but—he can't, can he? There is a particular electric sheen to the windows that implies that exit will be difficult.

Vornskr masks it well, practiced, but he's limping. His left leg resists supporting his weight. In this odd environment, Quinlan realises that he's smaller than he'd thought. He walks like a tall man and gives an impression of barely restrained force at all times, blocky and solid, but he's more streamlined that he seems to think he is, pared-back and surprisingly short, at least by comparison. Quinlan is struck by the image of a a few dozen of him, laid out top-to-tail in their shining coats in a tin like preserved fishes. They'd fit neatly.

The shirt of his armour—Quinlan still has not learned these words; the padded undershirt, with the metal frontispiece and the anchoring points for various obscure buckles and straps, whatever it's called—is set by the window where the light is good, and Quinlan realises the reason for the strange outfit. Careful, thick sewing in a blue that stands out against the black is sealing together two edges of a familiar-looking burned-edged tear.

"That's not gonna work," he says, before he can really stop himself. "You need a patch."

"What?"

"Uh," says Quinlan, and wonders, not for the first time, where this man learned anything at all, because this is one of the first things a youngling learns after starting live-blade combat lessons. "If you take a vibroblade to fabric, you get the same fabric in two pieces, right? It makes a neat cut, and you end with the same amount of fabric as you started with. But a lightsaber burns, and it has an area of about an inch where it just, you know, incinerates the fabric directly and singes the ages. So you have less fabric than you started with, and the edges don't line up. If you don't patch it over, it won't fit."

Vornskr makes a nasal noise. It might be a particularly subdued laugh.

"Figures," he says, resigned, tired. "It didn't fit in the first place, maybe this will help."

"Huh," he says. "Thought you Mandos had them made special."

The man goes stiff, or possibly stiffer, having already been doing a fair imitation of a steel rule. "They do," he says, and Quinlan is unable to get a single read on his emotional state. "But I'm not a Mandalorian."

He's going to have to find a new way to refer to him internally. There are only so many epithets available, and the whole thing is already getting confusing.

Quinlan searches for a response, winding a hand into the hair at the base of his neck for lack of any other appropriate movement. "You sure do your best to look like one," he says, entirely at sea.

The man sits down heavily on the edge of his stripped-bare bed and starts to work with one hand at the complicated mechanisms of his bracer, and for the first time Quinlan notices the way that they bite into the muscle of his forearms, and how the pauldrons are broader than his shoulders underneath them. There is a line of what he'd previously thought was a blade on the back of the bracer, but that doesn't make sense in terms of combat, and now that the idea is there he can see how the sharpened edge might be the remainders of clumsy surgery to the mechanisms of the device.

Now, look. Quinlan's missing a lot of cultural context. He's never really worked with Mandalorians; they're not the world's biggest fans of Jedi, and he knows that there's some kind of warfare going on, on and off, back in their home system that means you see fewer of them than you used to in spaceports, fewer Mandalorian mercenaries like in the old stories, more of the pacifist ones who just look like Coruscantis with slightly different accents. But he's pretty sure that the armour is _important._ He's pretty sure that this man swanning around in someone else's armour is an invitation to get himself dead, and he can't understand why he'd risk it.

He clicks the bracer into two pieces, thick leather-lined metal, and holds it out to Quinlan.

"Uh," he says.

"Psychometry," the man says. "Can you. Could you tell me who this belonged to. Please."

It doesn't sound like a question, really. It sounds like the kind of desperate thing he usually only hears from people who are dying.

It's not nice. Things like this, they never are.

There is a potentially infinite range of sensation that can embed itself into an object, but this is armour, meant for combat, and it's the kind of culturally significant object that collects impressions like white robes collect stains because people keep pushing their feelings onto it.

Like lightsabers. He never, ever touches anyone else's lightsaber. Some days, he doesn't even want to touch his.

What this particular piece of metal remembers is exhaustion, mostly. Deliberate, created exhaustion, and the kind of thirst that stings, and rotten, acrid fear, and badly-healing wounds. Not recent. Too close. Before that, the gut-wrenching certainty that you've been abandoned, blue light in the dark, grief-grief-grief-grief—

"Silas Damarhin," he says, once he can detach his fingers from the surface. "I don't know if that means anything to you."

He doesn't say, _whoever he was, he died wearing this._ He doesn't say, _whoever he was, he was taken alive and alone from the battlefield, and he was hurt until he wasn't him any more._

* * *

Cody watches a flock of birds in the distance, far enough that they blur into one grey shape against the sky, break into their component parts to move together and then form one thing again.

He wants to take the helmet off, to look the dead man in the face, but he also doesn't want Vos to look at _him,_ so he keeps wearing the borrowed face, sews up the hole in the broken, borrowed body.

"I owe you a debt," he says. The birds scatter and circle, hunting.

Vos looks perturbed.He usually expends a great deal of effort into never looking perturbed, as far as Cody can tell, so this is remarkable.

"Why did you come here?" Cody asks, because this question has still not been answered, and then, because Vos looks like he's about to fall down sideways, "Sit down."

Vos laughs, unsuccessfully, and attempts to hold onto his elbows, but without the robes it looks silly, childish. "I'm fine, thanks."

"Nobody's used the chair in the corner, ever, as far as I can tell," he suggests, because he doesn't know what's going on with Vos but he can guess.

"Someone made it," Vos says, but he does sit down, tucks his feet up off the floor without care for the upholstery. "Sewed the cushions, cut the wood. It is better, though. Thank you. You don't owe me."

"I do."

Vos looks a little less shaky; Cody gives him a few quiet minutes and fights back the urge to fetch him a blanket. The man is a traitor to the Republic, a defector, which is worse than an enemy; Cody shouldn't be treating him like a shaken-up rookie.

"I don't want you to owe me. It's just a name."

Cody says nothing. It's just a name, yes. But a name is a big thing. Bigger than fits in a few syllables. Big as choice and big as memory.

He doesn't want to owe Vos anything. He doesn't know how not to. He wants him gone.

So he kicks up one boot against the sideboard, sprawls a little, makes himself look like a total bastard. Looks flatly and blankly in Vos' direction. Disables the vocoder's broadcast of his breathing. Does everything in his power to make himself unsettling to be around.

He's exhausted. Sleep has never come easily, but now it's awful in a different way; he hasn't dreamt of the empty suit of armour in a long time, and he's grateful for that small mercy on the part of the universe, but still when he lies next to window at night to watch the little living things move and will himself to sleep, he feels things shift and change in the universe, and thinks he's being watched. Chased. Sometimes he looks up through the glass and sees the stars and thinks they're eyes; sometimes he thinks they're not even watching him.

He doesn't know if he's dreaming of the dead Zygerrian, or if he just wakes up and lies there and thinks of him in the hazy moments before his brain comes back online, turning the memory over and over. He never learned his name. He has no way to do so, now.

Vos smiles, bright and sincere-looking; it would be convincing if it hadn't been staring, wide-eyed, at his own hands a few seconds ago. It's a covering smile. He doesn't know what it's covered.

"Why are you here?" Cody asks again.

"What, I can't come visit?" Vos shrugs, loose. It's been a few weeks since Tur, and as far as Cody can tell, Vos had left again immediately on some other task. "I've been off-planet for a while, you know. Maybe I just wanted to avoid the seven-fork crowd that this place is filled with and talk to someone. I mean, you're a rude guy, sure, not great company, but you're better than the Separatist councillors."

The Separatists don't call themselves Separatists, he notes. They call themselves the Confederacy, or Independents, or any number of things; many of them try not define themselves in opposition to the Republic.

(Everything is so much more complicated than it used to be. He'd never realised, before, how much the CIS is a hundred little governments, all believing different things, all trying to go in different directions, forced into a single entity and united by an enemy rather than any commonality. In his particularly melancholy moments, he wonders: is the Republic the same? Is everything at war with itself, quietly, pretending to be one whole thing for the sake of the larger war? Is everyone? Or is it just him?)

Vos is lying. He's not here for company. But Cody can only tell that because he knows it already, knows that Vos lied to him before, lied to the Jedi, lied to his friends. Vos is a liar; ergo, he is lying. This one is a good lie. Nonsensical, of course, but compelling, because Cody desperately, desperately wants to be in a room with someone. Wants to sit down and talk. Wants to be around a person he isn't trying to kill.

Sometimes, loneliness is described as an emptiness. This doesn't feel empty. It feels full, solid and incompressible, pressing outwards against his skin, dragging out from the inside of his bones.

The silence reigns for long enough for hushed political factions to start considering a hushed revolution. The silence reigns, and then uncomfortable quiet founds a burgeoning democratic state from the ashes of the silence.

"The style you use," he says. "In the training hall. Ataru?"

"Yes," Vos says, looking a little baffled by the shift of topic, but cheerful regardless. "You recognise it?"

"Yes. I've seen it before."

"Oh? Where?"

Cody thinks: if you defect, is it better or worse to leave a person behind? Do you believe in this enough to bring her with you? Do you believe in this enough to go to battle knowing she might be on the other side? And he says, "Secura."

Vos looks up and, for a moment, looks like the vornskr in the cage, months ago—injured, desperate, like he'd eat him if he could. Cody had thought it would be more satisfying than it is. The expression disappears, but Vos hasn't found anything to replace it with yet. "You've seen her fight?" he says, like ice.

He's spent so long trying to hurt these people, because they're at war, he's at war, and that's what it means. He hasn't been able to. Now he's found a way; he knows that he has leverage here. He knows that he could twist the knife.

The old Sith turned out thousands and thousands of pages on personal motivation. What makes a person do what they do, what drives them. Some of that was self-focus, the drive to understand yourself, the idea that it needs time and purposeful effort and teaching, and Cody is fascinated by that. The other reason is this.

He knows Secura, not well, but he does. He knows what Bly thinks of her, at least. He knows enough accurate information to imply that he knows much, much more than he does; he could seize this particular crowbar and push, take out Vos' insides and rearrange, turn him in the direction of Dooku the way that he aims a blaster. The way that Dooku wants to turn Cody in the direction of the Republic and fire; the way, he realises, that Dooku may already be using Vos.

It's not that he can't do it. He can. He could. He probably should. But he doesn't. He lets the thread go, feels the Force shift in response.

"On holos," he says. Deflects. "Once or twice. Scary woman."

He searches for something else, anything else, to talk about, or just some way to finally force Vos to _leave,_ make the room empty and quiet again. He shakes out the corners of his mind and rifles through the cabinets for strategies. Comes up empty.


	10. Chapter 10

"I mean I want you to stop calling me Kote," he says, changing out the head on the lithography engraver and flipping the visor back down. Rex, leaning up against the workshop's doors, crosses his arms across his chest.

"You said that, and I will if you ask," Rex says, "But I want to know _why."_

"It's not—It's a silly name. It's childish."

"You earned it, though," Rex insists. "Everyone's heard the story by now—"

"It's a stupid story, and it was a stupid thing to do. I shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have said it."

Rex sighs, a little petulant and a little resigned, and Cody lets his shoulders drop a little from their protective position as the silence stretches. He focuses on the satisfying interlock of circuit components, on the neat efficiency of the resistor and the capacitor in the filter he's building, how two simple pieces put together can do unexpected things and how he can think it through from first principles and solid dedicated application of Kirchoff's laws and make it all make sense.

"We all remember it," Rex says. Cody puts the solder down, lets the heat ebb, flips his visor back and blinks as the world corrects to size-accurate magnification.

"Yeah, me too."

"You did the right thing, Ko- Cody." He corrects swiftly. Troopers change their names all the time; they're practiced in getting used to it. But Rex is right. Nobody thought he'd change his, because it was a good name, and he'd earned it, even if it _was_ childish, just a little. "I don't know why you've decided this now, for no reason."

"It wasn't the right thing," he says. It feels like there's something heavy in his stomach, and it feels like that all the time now; resignation, regret, fear. It didn't used to be like that, but he can't remember when. "It just felt right. It felt like it _should_ be right. It made a good story. But it was still disobeying orders, it was still insubordination. Lots of things feel right. I know it looked like bravery, but it was just bravado.

"There's a reason _keep your glory_ is an insult, Rex. It's putting—putting that nice idea, the feeling of what's right, the story of the cadet facing up to the idiot CO, doing it better, the nice little narrative, above what you _know_ is right. And what I know is right is following my orders. You can't pick and choose, or all you get is chaos.

"The machine falls apart if a single component doesn't work right.Why should I think I'm good enough to decide? I'm not bigger than our purpose. I don't want to think about Myrkr any more. I don't want people to look at me and tell stories about how I stole a squadron and ignored a direct order and told Alpha-Nine _kote lo'shebs'ul narit_ because that was wrong of me to do. It was wrong. And I don't want to encourage anyone else to what I did."

He doesn't look at Rex. Why is this so hard to understand? It hurts to think but that doesn't change the fact that it's true.

They're all going to die, sooner or later. Those are the facts of the matter. And they're going to die in battle, if they're lucky. Honourably. With loyalty to the Republic. To disobey orders just because you're afraid of dying isn't bravery. It's shirking duty. Evading responsibility. Moral cowardice.

He continues to believe that Myrkr was different. He knows, intellectually, that it was not; that his heart lies to him; that this is justification so that he can continue to live with himself. This doesn't help him to tackle the quiet burning thing tucked under his breastbone that continues to tell him, continues to insist, that it's different when it's your people and not just you, that there is value in keeping them safe.

There can be no compromise! The division is complete and total. To grow up on Kamino is to know that the whole of your loyalty is required, the whole of your obedience, the whole of your body, the whole of your mind. If you forsake even a portion, you give it all up, loose everything you are.

This is how you become a traitor: little by little. Piece by piece. A tiny decision that feels right, and then another. So you cannot loose the first little piece.

"Alright," Rex says, his voice sounding strange. Strangled. "If it's what you want. I'll put the word around."

"Thanks," he says, indescribably relieved. "Thanks, Rex."

"This has really been bothering you, huh?"

"Just a little," he says, the lie blatant and so obvious it's almost sarcasm. He shakes his head a little, checks the blueprints again, goes over his schematics; there's something missing, but he doesn't know what. Rex squints over his shoulder at the plans.

"What's it do?" he asks, and Cody takes the change of subject gladly, subjects Rex to a detailed explanation of aspects of the design of long-range transmitters that he absolutely does not understand and has no desire to understand.

* * *

Here's something Cody remembers: being afraid, so afraid, so stunningly, electrically terrified that he could barely sleep at night. So scared, all the time, that his performance was starting to slip, that he was sliding slowly but inexorably away from the top of the class rankings because he was busy trying not to choke. Seeing another cadet in an age-class a few points below his own and seeing nothing at all except the fact that he was _visibly_ defective, bright blond; something branded onto him the way that 2224's defectiveness was, he felt, branded onto his insides, burned into his guts. Seeing him and thinking, _distraction._ Thinking, _if I stand next to him, nobody's going to suspect me._

Here's something Cody remembers: seeing another cadet, younger than him and neater than all the rest of his company with his hair shaved right down to the scalp, visibly defective. Trying to hide it and failing miserably. Still allowed to live.Thinking, _like me! Like me! At last! Like me!_

Here's what happened, which is the only thing that matters: 2224 kicked the bench away from the table and sat down next to the CT in the mess, ignoring the rest of the cadet's batchmates. "You have Gauntlet Four tomorrow, right?" he asked. "Feel prepared?"

* * *

Ventress said:

You don't owe anybody shit. It's all a lie. There is no deserving. People talk about deserving things—when's the last time that the idea that people deserve freedom was used to give it to people? It's only used to take it away. You _don't_ deserve. If some people deserve it, some people don't. If some people don't deserve punishment, then logically some people do. If you deserve peace, that must be because somebody out there doesn't, or there would be no point saying it, would there?There must be something that renders you deserving. Something that you can loose. Something that can be taken away, or given. You choose to believe in deserving. Stop believing.

There is no debt. You don't owe anybody anything, not for feeding you, not for helping you, not for healing you, not even for hurting you. Take the idea of debt to its conclusions and watch it fall apart. If you owe what was given to you, you owe your life. More than that. You owe all the things you've ever lived, all the loves you've ever loved, all the hurts you've ever hurt, all the work you've ever done, and all the living you have yet to do, and all the living you could have done but didn't; you owe it to the people that made you, and you owe it to the people that made them. You owe it to all the people that made the world you live in. The domestication of the plants you eat from wild grains to bread. The filtration of the water you drink. The air you breathe. The medicine that keeps you alive. The culture in your head, the words you say, the stories you tell, the thoughts you think. Someone made them. Do you owe them everything you are?

This debt is too big to imagine. It's too big to pay. Death is not enough; the rest of your life is not enough. It grows and grows with every moment and you never _asked_ for it. A debt too large to pay that you were tricked into—that's a scam, plain and simple. It's fraud. And so you have two choices: believe the entire universe to be one great fundamental crime, or say that you do not owe what was given to you. One of these concepts is easier than the other.

When an idea isn't useful, you can throw it out. When you don't like an idea, you can forget it. There is no natural justice in the universe, which means that what happened to you wasn't just, because nothing is. There is no natural reason in the universe, which means there was no reason for what happened to you. There is no reason for you to be here, which means you get to choose your own. Go on, if you don't agree. Go find a fragment of justice, out there in the universe, and bring it to me to see.

There are a lot of slaves out there in the universe. Whole planets full, and more every day. It's not brute force keeping them that way; there isn't enough brute force in the universe. It's not just explosive chips. It's ideas. It's lies. Lies like these:

You need to earn it.

This is punishment for a crime.

This is the only way that works.

Nothing comes for free.

I have the right to do this.

This is justice.

This is the law.

This is your duty.

This is your own fault.

This is what you are.

This is the way it's always been.

This is because I love you.

You need to pay me back.

There is no way out.

You'd only break it if you did it yourself.

It might not be nice, but it's necessary.

If you don't deserve anything, if nobody deserves anything, if nothing can be deserved—what, then, is the point of owning? Then the only thing that owning is, is holding on. Hoarding. Taking.

So you can take, if you want to. Take whatever you like. You don't need to deserve it. You don't need to pay for it. You don't even need to need it.

And if someone says they own you, what that means is that they're holding on to you.

So take it. Take your life. Take your joy. Take your freedom. Take your body. Take your weapons. Take your honour, if you want it. Take your dignity. Take it back. Take everything that was denied to you. Take everything.

Well. That's not what she _said._ What she said was even more incoherent and mostly whispered. But Cody is pretty sure that's what she meant.

* * *

Cody wants to get in an argument. He wants a proper, knock-down drag-out no-holds-barred argument, the kind of twisting argument that needs a neutral referee, the kind where he has to cite his sources mid-speech or risk them falling out from under him. The kind of argument that clarifies the mind and burns through waste and leaves you only with a chain of perfect reasoning. The kind of argument that doesn't actually happen, ever, because all the serious arguments he's ever had only ended in both parties digging the trenches and refusing to cede ground and stomping away in a towering temper.

He hasn't been able to talk to anyone about the things he's been reading, the things he's been learning; it's just rattling around in his head. He needs to explain where the holes in the ideas are to someone else, because that's the only way to find the holes in the first place, sometimes. He doesn't want to _win_ an argument; he just wants to defend this thought that's got such a gripping hold on him and let someone else pick it apart.

She told it to him like a confession, lying there in the sand and the blood, like she believes all of it, like it would set him wholly free. It feels wrong to take that thing and poke holes in it. But he has to, because it doesn't make _sense._ The way that Ventress is living, you can't break free without becoming the kind of person who will take someone else's freedom. She believes this. Dooku believes it, too, or at least that's how he's living; he hasn't said it, but Cody can put together patterns of behaviour.

And her logic, he has to admit, is sound. But it's wrong! It's wrong. It has to be wrong. He doesn't know it's wrong, he just feels it. (He wonders, when he closes his eyes and knows the field of stars is there in the darkness turning as the universe does, does he _know_ that? Or does he feel it?) There's room in the idea for kindness; there's a space left open for it. You can be kind, so long as you admit that you're doing it just because you want to. But there's no space for responsibility.

You can't have the freedom without making it justifiable to take it from other people. Can you? Will someone else please _tell_ him?

He's spent his whole life trying to earn the right to live. Now someone's told him he doesn't have to. That takes up the whole of his head, like a pressure. Compelling.

It might be wrong, or it might be a little bit wrong, or it might only be partially wrong, but he thinks he needs to believe it. Just for a little while. Just for now. Then he'll find something else better to believe.

"I won't do it," Cody says. Dooku watches him, blank-faced, furious in the Force.

He's spent a lot of time making small concessions. Do this thing, just a little worse than the last thing. He's done a lot of things that didn't look important, that didn't look like they were going to affect what he cares about. But Cody believes that doing the little things right matters, and that means that doing little wrong things matters, too. So he's not going to cooperate any more.

He hadn't realised how dependent he'd become on having a helmet to hide behind. He's very proud of his blank facing-up-the-CO face, but it's a struggle now in a way it never seemed to be before. Maybe it's just because he's feeling more, these days, because the Force twists and lies and tangles you up but it also makes the colours brighter, makes life feel more like life. Maybe it doesn't matter, just now. He lets his lip curl, lets the teeth show; Dooku can face what he's made.

"Of course you will," Dooku says, outwardly calm, as though he's a misbehaving child, as though he's being unreasonable. Maybe he is. Cody's lightsaber, his borrowed, stolen saber, is still on his belt, because Dooku hates anyone to have a weapon he can't use against them.

"You could drag me all the way down to that planet myself," Cody replies, aware in a terrible way of how his mouth twists the sound of the words, "And I'd still refuse."

"Brave," Dooku says, the same way that Cody's training assessments had said it; it translates directly to 'you idiot.' He can't help it. It's in his nature. "I made you. I can have you unmade."

A lot of people made Cody, in bits and pieces like a rag doll. Almost all of them have wanted something from him in return, himself included. He's not going to give it any more. "You can," he agrees, brim-full of anger, clarified, cold and clean. The Force crowds close to emotion, any kind, and he lets it, welcomes it in and shows it how the fury feels. _Take it,_ he thinks. _Take it just because you want it._

* * *

Fett's eyes, he remembers, were black. He can't remember if the clone's were, when he was first found, but he knows they weren't like this.

It wasn't supposed to go like this. He wasn't supposed to learn this fast. This is the problem with apprentices; you take them in as tools and then they get ideas.

"We will revisit the question tomorrow," he says, and stands. There will be no argument; it's futile. The clone will do his job, eventually. In the grand scheme of things, this individual piece is not important, except as preparation for the greater task which is coming.

He's halfway out of the door when he feels it, and the shock stops him.

Taming a kyber crystal is a difficult task, and requires several hours of unbroken concentration. It shouldn't be possible to do it from a dozen paces, all in one rush of singular effort, like flash-forging metal, but that's—that's what's happening.

The crush of the Force feels like a physical pressure, like the way that water turns to concrete if you fall at it fast enough. The clone just stands there, head tilted like a dog that's just done a trick, as he turns and tunes the individual molecules of the kyber and teaches them who he is, hits them until they fall into place and recognise him.

That blade was taken from the tomb of a long-dead lord of Korriban, and had been loyal to its first Master all that time. Now it leaps into the air like a startled fish and sets itself, without any prompting, in the clone's hand. It comes to heel.

The prototype waits for some kind of acknowledgement. Maybe he hopes this theft will be enough provocation for Dooku to kill him for the slight; maybe he hopes for praise; maybe he just wants to provoke a reaction.

"Good," Dooku says, because it is. It is also a sign that he will need to change his plans, and their scope.

* * *

"You learn fast," Quinlan says, stepping back and stretching out his wrist. It's true, and sort of concerning; when he'd thought of teaching him a little Djem So as an excuse to shake him down for information, he hadn't thought he'd be teaching him anything he could actually _use._ Quinlan isn't a close-quarters fighter, never refined his own combat to the levels Aayla's achieved, and wasn't a specialist in the style besides, but he's pretty sure that a man who wasn't even certain what the difference between Djem So and Shien was when they started shouldn't be giving him this much trouble.

The style suits him, though. It's bullheaded.

The apprentice huffs. "Good engineering," he says, and Quinlan marks that one down in the 'he's actually a droid' theory column as he settles back into a starting stance. The man's tired, though, and Quinlan doesn't want to push past the point of useful practice, so he drops his saber back into his pocket and rolls out his shoulders.

Vornskr is always a little off-balance whenever Quinlan calls a spar on the grounds of one of them being worn out, as though he expects them to keep swinging at each other until one of them is on the verge of death. It's a very Sith sort of attitude. He isn't good at moderation. "Done?"

"Done," Quinlan agrees, pulling his jacket over his shoulders and tugging his gloves off; he reaches out and gently socks him on the shoulder, the kind of friendly gesture of camaraderie that immediately puts Vornskr's back up and also, incidentally, happens to give him a bundle of compressed sensory impression direct to the brain-stem.

There is the rotten, twisted impression of torture, but that's starting to be layered over by the man currently occupying the shell of the armour, and Quinlan's expecting it, can brace through it and reach for the more recent, more subtle impressions.

Most of them are unnerving and upsetting; there's a Zygerrian, on the ground, convulsing silently, bleeding onto tiles that Quinlan almost recognises; there's the ever-present and unfortunately familiar feeling, like a storm-cloud, like static electricity on the inside of the skin, of someone who really, really wants someone else dead; there's skin and the white glow of the lights of the keep at night and the sting of applying the stitches yourself, because there's nobody else to do it for you. But he can push through all that, and then he gets something _useful,_ for just a moment.

Dooku, at his desk, and his outfit puts it at only a few days ago. A strange raw, vulnerable, deeply unpleasant feeling that Quinlan struggles to identify, until he realises it's what Vornskr feels like with his helmet off. Some deep-seated issues there, apparently. The turning of the stomach. Stubbornness, which can be a physical feeling if you try hard enough. "Null," Dooku says, not looking up from his datapad. "Next Centaxday. You will perform the retrieval, and I will be there to observe your performance—"

The impression cuts off there, but that's all right. It's already enough information to be very, very useful—Dooku keeps his movements secret, and Serenno is too well-guarded to attack him here, but if the GAR know where he'll be in a week, that's enough time to prepare a strike. And if it fails, and Dooku realises someone's leaked the information, it'll come down on someone else's head.


	11. Chapter 11

Quinlan's going to die.

"Sure," he says to the blue holo. "Sure, I'll be there. No problem, upending my current project to _supervise,_ no problem."

"You have no current project," Dooku says, and Quinlan knows he's testing his patience, but he has a very good excuse: he's going to die. Joke's on him, though: Quinlan has a very significant project that is now crashing down around his ears.

He'd assumed that, if Dooku was going down to Null, it would be accompanied by his retinue, guards and droids and fighter escort ships. The blame if they got ambushed by the GAR and got away would fall on the staff first, and then Vorkskr, and then whoever pissed him off most today, and Quinlan, by virtue of having no reasonable way to have known the information, would be safely out of the blast radius. Most spy work isn't in collecting information, it's in deflecting attention.

But it's a small, secret task, apparently. And it'll just be Dooku and Vornskr and him, because Tur had gone _so well_ and they _worked well together_ and they were _getting along._ Appalling. And he's willing to bet money that whatever Dooku thinks Vornskr's risk of turning traitor is, it's lower than Quinlan's. And, just to cap off the whole grand disaster, he can't make another concealed transmission until a week from now, when the bounce satellite is in position so he can hop it past the Serennese security net, so he can't tell whoever they've got on Dooku-Assassinating Duty that he'd really appreciate it if they'd hold off for another couple weeks, please.

Then there's the other problem. Considering the balance of probabilities, the chance that whoever they've got will fail to nab the bastard and that the aforementioned bastard will turn around and take Quinlan's head off for the attempt is a fair risk to take against the chance that they'll succeed and end the war. And it's a risk he'd want them to take.

The attachment to being alive is one that comes pre-installed, free with purchase of a body. It's not one that's easy to overcome. But part of being a Jedi is knowing that you can't hold on to anything forever. If you have to sacrifice a pawn to end the game, to end the war, to end the slaughter, better it be him.

"Well, you've got my number," he says, and turns the communicator off before Dooku can start in on another speech on a topic like Quinlan's inveterate idleness, or Quinlan's refusal to engage seriously with the teachings of the Sith in favour of just doing whatever he feels like, or Quinlan's lack of table manners.

* * *

He did have to be dragged onto the ship. He made it very difficult, and he's proud of that, but it does unfortunately mean that his whole body is now one big bruise and he's still statically charged enough that occasional sparks jump from his armour to the metal of the halls.

Vos, who did not have to be dragged but is never-the-less evidently not having a good time, stands across the bridge in a manner designed to resemble a casual lean without requiring his body to come into contact with the wall. His body language is jumpy, nervous in a way that Cody wouldn't have noticed a few months ago, but he has a hard time telling his brain to pay attention, because the ripples he leaves in the Force are almost entirely calm; he is either suppressing his Force presence to hide his emotional state, or is mimicking nervousness for some end.

It seems to be significantly more difficult to hide in both the body and the Force than it is to do only the one. He's felt it himself; when he has one under control, the other starts to slip. He isn't hiding either at the moment. He has no idea what he's radiating into the Force, but he knows that there's a lot of it. Vos keeps shooting him sideways looks. It's almost amusing.

Dooku refuses to wait on the bridge as they descend through the atmosphere, instead holing himself up in the tactical room; Cody doesn't know why he particularly wants some Jedi down on the planet dead specifically, instead of just dead in general, but he can guess. He suspects that Dooku thinks that sending an assassin after the man instead of killing him himself is some kind of triumph over whatever personal reasons that he has to want him dead, but he spoils the pretence somewhat by coming along and sitting in the dark by himself, doing a bad parody of the concept of obsession.

He's killed for Dooku once. He didn't realise that that was what he was doing, he never meant to, or at least if he'd thought about it for more than three seconds he wouldn't have meant to, but he did it. The only thing he'd been able to do, afterwards, was wait in the windowless room with the Zygerrian as he'd died, refuse to be moved until he couldn't refuse any longer, wait and watch. It took hours.

He will not kill for him again.

A part of his brain is entirely underwater, drowning, and it insists to him, all the time, that there's no point in resisting. That he was made broken and he's always going to be broken; that everything is hurt because everything was made broken, all the universe and all the spinning stars, and everything is always going to be broken. Sometimes that part wins.

But this is how you get out of bed:

You think, _everything is broken and bleeding._ You think, _there is a crack all through the universe._ You think, _everything hurts._ And then you watch the world go by. You think, _if it's bleeding, then it's flesh; it isn't cracked, it's wounded._ You think, _does it inflict hurt or does it experience it?_ You think, _if it's alive, then it can heal._ You stand. You go on with your work.

So he insists, back to himself, that there _is_ a point in resistance, and that it's worth trying.

He's twigged by now that he's not going to get to Dooku by attacking him directly; he has only beaten him once from an uncountable number of spars, and he'd been too stunned by the sight of his own victory to actually kill him like he should have. Sabotage is possible and attractive, but to do that he'd have to present a much better image of an obedient and loyal apprentice than he currently is, and he thinks that effort might just kill him. His skills at lying are limited to convincing brothers that he hasn't seen the groundlander real fruit that went missing, and he's not all that good at that; attempting to fool Dooku into thinking he believes the shit he says about his great and noble goals would make for good comedy _and_ good tragedy.

So.

A List of Mutually Exclusive Choices, as Observed by Cody, Date Unknown, Approx. 7956:

  1. Keep trying to hurt Dooku however he can.
  2. Get far away. Get far away from him and the war and everybody, so far and so free that nobody will ever aim him at their enemies again.



He's stuck in this cycle of thought, wanting one, wanting the other, wanting, wanting, wanting, when the siren sounds.

Vos makes a face like a stuffed frog for about three seconds before he remembers that there is supposed to be a sentient response to the automated hostile-detection system. It is not, Cody realises, the reaction of a man expecting a hassle-free murder-mission; it takes him longer than it should to realise this, because the siren onboard this ship sounds exactly like the one they'd used during orbital bombardment on Vaimir VII, and his brain is appalled at the inaction of his body and is attempting to climb out through his ears to start shouting, to co-ordinate the retreat back to the last set of barricades, because the bomb line's moved again and there are still troopers out in no-man's-land after the last set of shells.

But there are no shells, and no 212st, and the only trooper stuck out where he shouldn't be is him.

"Incoming," Vos says, and his body language is still tight, his Force presence light and shallow and controlled, and Cody realises he knew this was coming. "Fighter intercept."

The grouping of crafts, familiar patterns of paint on the nosecones and broad wings, is the kind of unit they ought to be sending out for bigger targets than a single low-profile starship, but Cody's brain still says _send more, send everything you've got, why aren't they pulling out the big guns_ before he can wrench it back to the order of the day: blind panic. "Lightning Squadron," he says, and then firmly shuts his mouth and resolves not to open it again until it learns to behave.

So they are pulling out the big guns, after all. (He doesn't notice that he's thought 'they,' and not 'we.' He won't notice until much later.)

Vos startles, blinking at him, and says "Why do you know that?"

Cody's always been good at integrating new information into the battleplan. The new information is: Vos is a liar, but the lie isn't what he thought. The new information is: oh, thank _fuck._ The new information is: Vos is about to stop being a liar and start being dead, because Dooku, two airlocks away, has just found out about the intercept and made a few vital logical leaps and he's already reaching for his blade.

He makes a decision.

* * *

If you drop a lead ball onto a rubber sheet, it makes an impression rather like the one Dooku is currently making on the Force. The anger rises so suddenly that it makes Quinlan's eyes sting, but he pretends it isn't there, puts himself firmly back into character and starts pushing buttons, trying to remember if this ship has any artillery he can discharge right now so that it can't be discharged in a few minutes when Windu's men are close enough to be damaged by it.

Vornskr doesn't react like a man ought to when there's a hostile grouping just coming out of cloaking and charging the high-impact weaponry on the starboard side; he stands still, which is a feat to accomplish when Quinlan's just started plausibly-deniably half-hearted defensive manoeuvres, and he laughs.

Quinlan doesn't understand it at all, at first, and he's seen enough of the Sith to assume that it's some kind of unhinged response to imminent combat, but that contradicts what he's seen of him so far, for all that his only hobbies seem to be attacking things and reading books about the thickness and density of his helmet about different kinds of violence. So that's not it. And while some of the clones are prone to allegedly-humorous paintings on their vehicles, the approaching squadron, not so much. So that's not it, either.

It's a genuinely happy laugh, he thinks.

"Good luck," Vornskr says, something in his voice that Quinlan's never heard before. He's reminded, again, that there's something familiar there. He thinks he should probably have chased up that particular lead a little more.

The man's Force presence, which spends most of the time oscillating between 'eerily unremarkable; resembling that of a particularly intelligent medical droid' and 'frankly terrifying,' sharpens and blooms, like ink in clear water. The rush of intent, sincere and pure, is strong enough to obscure even the emotion that caused it, but underneath is relief, sweet but curdled, like he hasn't had any of it in a long time.

Then he turns on his heel and, taking advantage of a particularly dramatic and useless roll of the ship through the atmosphere, wrenches an entire pilot's chair from the cockpit. The equipment begins to wail, or rather begins to wail louder; rivets ping against the atmospheric seal, the metal screaming as it bends. It shouldn't bend like that.

The airlock into the tactical rooms hisses as the seal breaks. Dooku has a face like an industrial accident in the triangle factory, and it's made for expressions like this one: glowering, towering, murderous rage. His eyes lock onto Quinlan where he's wrestling with the grav-boosters just as the first volley of fire rolls over the shielding. Quinlan's brain has a great deal in common with the ship's navigational systems, in that it's mostly made of sirens, and is struggling to decide on one threat to focus on, processing systems all still being occupied by trying to work out why Vornskr's wielding the pilot's chair like a club.

That particular question is solved in short order, because Vornskr promptly swings the whole blunt instrument directly at Dooku's head. Dooku attempts to parry, with an impressive turn of speed, but it turns out that you can't parry a chair with a lightsaber; the top portion of the thing shears off entirely, without any change in its momentum, the metal red-hot and partially molten from the plasma, and still firmly on the original collision course. Vornskr flings the half still in his hands after it and scrambles back, his blade leaping to his hand and burning out into the air.

Dooku hits the airlock sill hard, and Quinlan is suddenly reminded—it's easy to forget, when he's skilled enough to kill you before you realise you're in danger—that whatever the Dark side can do, he's not cracked that particular portion that stops you from ageing, that he's still a relatively old man with blood on his face. Vornskr steps back, all of his incongruous cheer from before evaporated.

That was a lucky hit. Now Dooku's decided who his enemy is, and Quinlan, as grateful as he is for this particular twist in the plot, doesn't like Vornskr's chances of survival.

"What did you _expect?_ " Vornskr says, his particular accent twisting the sibilants, making it sinister, and he's—he's trying to take the fall for this. He's framing _himself._ He's not just attacking him for kicks, he's trying to draw the fire from Quinlan. Trying to save him. "Told you that dragging wouldn't do you any good."

What?

What the fuck?

"Keep us in the air, Vos," Dooku says, cold, giving a fair impression of being calm and collected, even as the ozone crackles. "I'll deal with him."

Another volley of shots burst against the shields, fizzing white light, and Quinlan puts a fist through the siren just to make it shut up. He _knows._ He gives it another five minutes, seven if he puts his back into his evasive action, which he doesn't plan on doing, until he has to start seriously shooting back in order to maintain any semblance of a cover—or maybe he can find a convenient mountain to crash into?

The fighters would usually be slower than a ship like this, the kind of top-of-the-line over-engineered beast that Serenno churns out by the thousands, but Quinlan's left the gravitational breakers on, which throws out turbulence and makes the aft half of the ship basically one whole tornado of air drag, and, notably, will not show up on the diagnostics afterwards. So the little triangles in the distance are zipping closer all the time, gaining. The turbulence leaves breakaway trails in the clouds, streaking across the horizon as it dips and rolls. Quinlan tries to focus on that, but it's tricky, because it's tricky concentrating on _anything_ while two Sith are having it out behind you in a cockpit that suddenly feels much smaller than it needs to be, even with Vornskr having done some DIY decluttering.

Vornskr, he thinks, didn't expect to win this fight when he started it. There's no way off this ship without going through Dooku, and the only way through is single combat against a man who has spent his entire life dedicated exclusively to the art of duelling, right up until the moment when he decided he wanted to be a dictator.

Unless...

He narrowly dodges a stray blade, and tragically loses half of a dreadlock to the plasma. Then he turns the ship in something that will almost resemble a defensive maneouvre, putting them into a sharp curve out of the cloud-line and down towards the earth. The fighters take advantage, pulling up alongside; he has to silence another proximity alarm.

Then, with a tiny, tiny twist of the Force, unnoticeable against the backdrop of twisting, screaming Dark that the fight behind him is giving off, he depresses the ejector button next to the new hole in the co-pilot's nook.

Vornskr thinks quick, or maybe he's just not holding onto something, because the sucking pressure of the atmosphere roaring past is much, much stronger than Quinlan had anticipated. Either he jumped or he was just flung out into space.

He banks the ship, brings the nose up so fast that he almost rams directly into part of Lightning Squadron, and attempts to block out the unholy noise of Dooku's fury.

* * *

Jedi jump off things all the time, because they're idiots. Cody is not prone to jumping from the tops of buildings when the elevator exists, at least not without a jetpack, and so he's never learned the particular trick of slowing a fall from terminal velocity to a velocity slightly less terminal. He is now regretting that particular oversight. He thinks he's discovered whole new kinds of regret, tumbling end-over-end like a credit chip in an industrial washing machine.

Protocol takes over; he fights the sucking, roaring wind and the drumbeat pressure, sticks his arms out, watches the green of the forest far, far below as it resolves, slowly, so slowly, into detail. Ice forms on the visor of his helmet, blurring everything to white-grey, and the wispy cloud is much less wispy when you're falling through it.

Of all the things to complain about as you plummet to your death, he hadn't been expecting to be particularly annoyed by the fact that he's _damp._ The pressure pushes the ice-water under the armour, pressing through the thick armourweave, and the cold is like a shock, almost forces him back into a ball just to conserve heat.

His hand is convulsively tight on his saber. He doesn't intend to ever let it go again.

Metal-grey, in the corner of his vision. He fights the air, which is almost a solid thing when you're going through it this fast, just to turn his head; one of the fighters has peeled away, is tracking him, above him.

Their targeting systems would have logged him as a missile, first, he realises, which is almost funny. Then he'd been plummeting, fighting through the air for the saber, wrenched from his grip by the fall and turning, blade burning, in the air like a firework, and they'd have seen that before he could drag it back to him, logged him as a Sith, a threat.

Sensible to send someone after him, then. If he pulls his focus together, he can make out the warping of the Force, can track the life in the cockpit; that's not a brother in there, it's General Windu. The big gun himself.

Is that what he is? A Sith, a threat? He isn't sure.

He's just going to plow directly into the rock like a meteorite, maybe blow out a few windows if he hits hard enough. Or—no, hang on. He doesn't know how to stop himself falling, but the craft is headed down as well, all he has to do is fall slower than the other guy.

He breathes out hard against the crush of the air, concentrates through the lens of the terror, and grabs his own back and yanks. It's like pulling the pilot's chair free of its rivets; when you do it with the body, you need leverage, a solid place to stand and haul against, and when you do it with the Force, you make your own mind the bracing-place, use your bones as a lever but provide the impetus for movement not with the muscles but the mind.

He doesn't stop falling, he just stops accelerating, and the spacecraft, with its thumping engines, roars past him. He lets go of himself, relinquishes the starfish-shape, and the triangular edge of the wing whirs past him at what is not, probably, the speed of sound relative to his head, but which feels a great deal like it. The impact almost pulls his arm clean out of its sockets as his hand catches onto the edge, and only judicious application of another hard shove with the Force prevents him from having to re-set a dislocation while still plummeting to earth like a tin can full of hailstones. The craft spins as it dives, and the twist pulls him into the wing; he flattens himself against the metal, having had quite enough of flapping about like a banner.

He's never had vertigo this bad in his _life,_ and he was once stuck in a zero-g training sim while the rotation axle jammed.

Then, surprisingly, the craft rights itself, and there's a stable surface underneath him; it's slick with ice and water and anti-drag insulating coating, but, more importantly, it's between him and the ground. He thinks he's going to write an ode to solid surfaces. He can't believe he's spent his entire life until now without a proper appreciation for how wonderful it is to be on top of something that isn't just ten straight kilometres of troposphere. His helmet gently thunks against the metal in a gesture of appreciation.

From up here, he can see the curve of this planet, vast. Or maybe it's just lensing.

Shaking with adrenaline and tension and the chill of altitude, he beats back the part of his brain that is singing that he _won,_ he won, he won. He hasn't. He can't afford to crash now, because the fight's not over. You can never, ever let down your guard; there is no safe place.

The ship could spin at any moment, throw him off into space, and he doubts he's going to get away with the same trick again, so he _pushes,_ uses the reinforced fingers of his gauntlet as a chisel and bashes a handhold into the insulating coating of the wing, something to cling to, something more reliable than the ground. They're still headed down, a lazy glide now, but he won't look over the side to see the ancient forests as smears of paint down below, has no idea how high they are; this helmet isn't made for an air battalion, has no altitude sensor or jetpack guidance on the HUD. He'd never been afraid of heights before. He might be, now.

The effort makes black spots waver across his vision for a moment. Maybe it's the effort, maybe it's the cold, maybe it's lingering electrical damage, maybe it's the thin atmosphere. He can't feel his fingers, now, closed on the saber and clenched into the insulation.

He's so tired. Every moment, the push of air and screaming of wind tries to drag him off, and every moment he has to push back against it. The acceleration, or the deceleration, they're impossible to tell apart with his head this scrambled, is a feeling all through his body, pulling at his bones.

Time wavers and stretches, as it does in battle; tiny seconds become hours, but long minutes disappear into hyperspace without him ever seeing or understanding them. Then, from the corner of his eyes, green, dark green. The tops of trees, as they flicker past. It feels surreal; it feels like he was going to be flat against the metal for years, decades, the rest of his life. An angling rudder lifts under his leg, attempts to stab him in the knee; he knows his weight and shape is throwing off the landing as they descend through the forest, but, well, there's not much he can do about that.

The landing thrusters engage, sending rumbling vibrations all through his body from where his torso is flattened against the wing, setting the armour to rattling. His jaw aches, the way it often does but worse, almost stabbing, from keeping the bones tensed so long, but he can't open his mouth properly in this helmet. Which is probably a good thing, because if he could, he'd just have been screaming the whole way down.

The loss of the wind is jarring. Astonishing, how quickly you can get used to something. Tentatively, like stepping out into a minefield, he peels his head off the wing surface.


	12. Chapter 12

Dooku pushes the ship directly to hyperspace as soon as they're technically clear of the atmosphere; the stray air caught in the borders of the hyperspace bubble might fall back down to the planet as superheated, radioactive plasma, or might end up streaked across the star system as the same, cause someone some significant problems down the line, but he isn't particularly bothered. The little sacrifices are necessary, sometimes.

At least now he knows who was funneling information through to the Republic. A spy too close to him could be disastrous; lucky, then, that this particular spy wasn't skilled enough to keep his involvement quiet.

A good plan is flexible. Within the week, he'll know if this one's succeeded.

There are two possible outcomes of this. The first is that the clone dies, either in the fall or at the hands of the GAR. This would be regrettable, of course; a waste of good design and time. A waste of talent. The second possibility is that he'll be taken back to Coruscant, either as a prisoner of war or as a criminal, or even as a recovered soldier, in which case the investment will have paid off.

He would have chosen to send him away later; a few months more, at least. But now will do. He doesn't need to be unstoppable, he just needs to be visible.

As a youngling, hearing the ghost stories that were handed down from generation to generation like secrets, Dooku had learned that the vornskr hunted Jedi. As an adult, he'd learned they were less discriminating, less malicious, simply a part of the ecosystem; they hunted the Force-sensitive. And then he'd found the old Sith archives, what little remained of them outside of the Unknown Regions, and learned of the vornskr introduced to Dromund Kaas, a different kind of beast. Introduced as a weapon, forty thousand years adapted to that role; the vornskr of Dromund Kaas didn't hunt the Jedi, they hunted the Sith.

Soon, they will again.

Sidious' strength isn't his mastery of the Dark Side, or his political genius; it's his ability to keep himself concealed, his motivation and goals. It's his skill at camouflage, at keeping his machinations hidden, that's allowed him to create an army of weapons against the Jedi, and so it's only fitting that they should be turned against him.

There is no hiding from the vornskr. How they do it has never been understood, the mechanism a mystery, but there is no countermeasure; the ancient Sith had been fascinated. This experiment has been done before, documented in great detail. If it all works as it ought, all they have to do is bring the clone within a mile of the senate and the secret will be out.

He doesn't need to kill him. All he has to do is find him, messily and publicly and in a well-documented manner, and poke holes in Sidious' flawless mask.

Still, he thinks, it would have been pleasant to keep him just a while longer. He'd have started to get over his hangups soon, and he could have been properly useful.

Once his master is dead, Dooku will be able to find a _true_ apprentice. Someone _worthy_ of the role. Someone who deserves it.

Most people, really, don't have any choices. The clone is one of them. Or maybe the word is 'was.' As a child you think that everyone else in the world is a person like you, real and fleshed out on the inside and doing what they choose, but the truth is that all their choices are made for them, except for one: monster or machine. A wild animal will hurt you because of what it is. A droid will hurt you because of what it was made to do. Most people aren't people.

So what Dooku's done to the clone isn't much, considering. Only moving him between categories. Making him more useful. Hardly damage at all. People do it to themselves every day of the week.

* * *

The forests on Null are continental in their breadth, or so it had looked from the planetary entry. It turns out that they're also huge in the vertical direction. There is no sky unless he tilts the sky all the way up, the vast old-growth trunks crowding out the grey clouds; it's like Coruscant, he thinks. Except less alive.

Cody slides off the wing in an undignified scramble as the landing gears click and steady. Up close to the ship is a hot rush of heat from the engines, and he has to fight it to move away. Some part of his mind, still scrambled from the fall and lizard-like, insists to him that the warmth is safety, and the cold dark forest is danger. In fact the opposite is true.

The cockpit cover hisses as it rises up. Cody barely hears it, ears full of the ringing from the sudden pressure changes.

Once, a hundred years ago, he stood next to General Windu in a dark theatre and found the stillness, his calmness, bluntness, comforting. Maybe because it hadn't demanded anything of him then. Now it's demanding something, but he doesn't know what it is; maybe all faces look threatening in that purple light.

The earth here is soft, uncompacted by traffic, and there's no sound as Windu drops from the craft. There is no sound at all, except the distant noise of wind; whatever birds there are have gone silent. Wet foliage. Motor oil and ozone.

Now he knows something new: if you intend to negotiate, you do not reach for your lightsaber. His own is bright in his hand, though he hasn't asked it. It anticipates him, now. Works with him. It wants. He doesn't know what the blade wants, either.

He thinks, _you saw the shape of me in the Force and your first thought was that I ought to die._

_What was your second thought?_ He breathes out, watches the hot air form clouds of smoke. His blade flickers out, and he blinks in the sudden darkness; he hadn't realised how little light reaches the forest floor.

"Am I under arrest?" he asks, slow, trying not to shout so he can hear himself.

There are two questions. The first is whether he could get out of a fight with Windu alive, and the answer is a categorical no. The second is whether, given some freak accident or warp of probability, if he had the opportunity, he would kill him in return. Because if it comes down to it, if he _is_ under arrest, that would be the only way out.

There are stories. Troopers gossip like anything. Windu is the one they send after the fleeing who the bounty hunters can't catch or won't catch; he doesn't stop and he doesn't let go.

Of course, that's assuming that Cody even wants to run.

"Do you think you should be?" Windu asks, because there's nothing the Jedi like more than answering a question with another question.

"Yes."

Yes. Yes, he'd very much like for someone to look at him and come up with a sentence. Something to do. A responsibility he can accept. Justice done. Some sentence he can serve in restitution for what he did to the dead Zygerrian whose name he will never know, to Silas whose name he does know, to the Tur system and their centuries of accumulated knowledge, to the people who died and suffered so that dead Sith lords could compile the books of detached theory he's been living in, to the brothers he abandoned to die without him while he was busy sitting in fine rooms teaching himself.

He'd very much like some justice done, and he'd like it done to him. It'd be so much easier than this.

"What for?"

It's not entrapment, he remembers, if you know why he's asking it. The reason he's asking is that he doesn't know, because he isn't here to deal with _Cody—_ he's here to deal with some unidentified dark-sider on the Separatist side, and if he's dragged back to Coruscant, it won't be for justice for the Zygerrian. It might vaguely involve Tur. It won't address Silas Damarhin, because the Republic wouldn't register that as theft.

"Murder," he says. "Theft. Will that do? Not in your jurisdiction, though, I don't think. Prosecution might be hard."

He turns away, doesn't want to look at the blade. There's ice melting on his visor, and it's turned the world to a blur, the light scattering; he reaches up, hooks his thumbs under the metal.

The ice falls off the visor as he wipes it off against his gauntlets, and shatters against the earth. In front of Dooku, he'd kept his mouth firmly closed, busy trying to pretend nothing had changed and he hadn't done anything to him, but a cursory analysis reports that he simply does not have the energy to care, to hide it. He tilts his face up into the cold air, lets his eyes slide closed instead of watching Windu's expression to try to analyse the twitches, and relief and pain rolls down tensed muscles as he levers his mouth open. The muscles at the base of the mandibles ping panicked little signals at being moved after so long held tight, pressed against the teeth.

He's spent his entire life being moved from place to place at the behest of the Republic. He is so _tired._ He isn't sure if he has the energy to resist it again.

"Desertion," Windu says. It sounds like a question, almost.

Well. He's got him there.

* * *

It's not until the clone actually turns to face him again that Mace recognises him. His most distinctive feature is his jaw, or possibly his jaws in the plural, and that wasn't there, the last time he saw him. But the scar is the same, if less stark. He'd learned to tell them apart by force-signature, which isn't difficult, but that's different now, too.

He barely knew Commander Cody. Now he supposes he knows him even less.

He'd said 'not in your jurisdiction' easily, like it's a bureaucratic piece of nonsense, quickly overcome, but it _isn't._ He has his authority because the Republic grants it to him, and it stops where the Republic does.

The point is that someone has to be responsible. The point is that, no matter what he's done, no matter what he's just said he's done, if it isn't within the jurisdiction of the Republic, then it ceases to be an arrest and becomes extrajudicial vigilantism. He has gone that far before. He doesn't want to do it again.

"That one would be easy, yes," the commander agrees, like there's some joke Mace hasn't understood. Is he still a commander, after being declared dead? "The evidence is pretty damning. You might even be able to add theft of Republic property to Dooku's rap sheet."

There have been no prosecutions of clones for desertion. Even the incident with the spy was settled in a way that made Mace uneasy, the decisions secret, the trial kept quiet. He doesn't know if that's because none have deserted before, or if nobody has been able to stomach the thought of dragging one back.

His orders were clear. The Jedi had been asked specifically to apprehend the new Sith apprentice, and it had sounded much less ominous when he'd heard it; usually, when asked to apprehend someone, it's on clear ground, a warrant issued by lawful authority for arrest of someone too dangerous to send anyone else after. He knows the words of his orders—apprehend—and he knows what they mean: remove. Remove from the war. By any means necessary.

It's a sensible goal, too. Ventress alone has done incalculable damage to their efforts, killed hundreds of soldiers. The danger that one dark-sider among the Separatists poses is serious, significant, immediate, and expressible in lives.

He will not kill a man who has put away his weapon. He has made oaths. But he's made oaths to the Republic, too. Oaths to champion its justice and obey its lawful orders. Desertion is a crime. It is not a crime to use the Dark; it is not a crime to be a Sith.

He can't even imagine how it would proceed. Like the matter of the spy, whose name was never published? A media circus? Or, even worse, no trial, only returned to Kamino like stolen property. He has made oaths to the Republic, and if—if those oaths include, not only the commanding of an army of involuntary soldiers, but announcing that it is wrong for a man who never volunteered for the role to leave it...

He has grown used to horror in the course of carrying out his duties. Now the horror is right up close, and worse, because it's wearing the face of justice.

He has a direct order from the Chancellor. He has only one way to fulfil it, only one valid reason to bring him back as a prisoner.

He sends the forest back into the dark, the warm glow of his sabre blinking out and leaving him blinking back the afterimage of the light. In the dark, it's harder to see what's wrong with the man's face. It blurs into the outline, the familiar Fett-face, looking dazed, his noctilucent eyes like akk dogs in the firelight. "No," Mace says. "You're not under arrest, Cody."

There are two options: first that he did this himself, and second that it was done to him. Both are horrifying. There are records of this sort of thing, deep in the archives, the Sith histories that are restricted in their readership. Developing Vaapad, he read many horrible things, and it's that experience, he thinks, that lets him accept it. That's his face. He doesn't know how to fix it, or if he wants it fixed. It has nothing to do with Mace.

(Unless, of course, he uses it as a weapon. That's already been acknowledged and considered, listed in the constant litany of threat and response, and he has a counter prepared—but he doesn't think he will. He hopes he won't.)

"Right," Cody says, looking stunned, and—disappointed? "Right. Thanks for that. That's my name. That's my name, it belongs to me."

"No thanks necessary," Mace says, as his eyes adjust to the low light. "It's not a favour."

"Right," he says again, and staggers. His eyes are wide, there's a blooming bruise crawling up the side of his neck, and he's shaking faintly, barely perceptible. "I'm—I can go? I can go."

He shakes his head hard, and when he opens his eyes again they're less acid-yellow, less bright, the more familiar shining black. He mumbles something inaudible, looking past Mace, or maybe through him, watching the forest as he turns in a slow circle. He looks lost, or maybe ill.

Mace doesn't know how to help him. He also doesn't think he particularly wants to. Even confused and aimless, he had said 'murder' with astonishing, disturbing ease. And the end goal of the Sith is the extermination of the Jedi, their complete destruction. Even if he doesn't look up to much destruction.

* * *

He looks up again, just to see the grey sliver of sky above without the helmet visor in the way. Night is coming, now; he doesn't know how long the day is on this planet, but it's darker than it was. His eyes are almost refusing to focus, a dull ache in the back of his head on top of all the other, sharper, older aches.

He turns back, looks Windu in the face again. Blinks away a bit of the blur. "Could you, though? Do me a favour," he asks, tries to make it clear that this is a question, and that 'no' is one possible answer. "Take a message back. Please."

Windu stares at him blankly. He doesn't think he'd have been able to pick out detail in this gloom, before, but he can now, can see the caution in his expression. He doesn't owe him anything. There's no reason for him to say yes, except that Cody's asking.

"Yes," Windu says.

Cody drags air into his lungs, wet with rain and smelling of smoke and forest. "For," he says, and cannot trim back the list of names to something manageable. Too many people he would trade his right arm to talk to again. "For—I don't know who's still..."

"I can tell Commander Ponds," Windu says, like he's trying to solve a problem, "If he'll know who else to contact."

Yes. Perfect solution. Ponds will know. And this way, he doesn't have to start at the top of his list and start asking who is still alive, if he'd even know.

"Yes," he says, and watches a bright-winged bird weave through the trunks, washed to grey by the twilight. "Yes, tell him. He'll know who else to tell. Tell him that—I'm still alive. That I miss him, that I miss everyone, all the time. That I'm still his brother."

Windu waits, and Cody gets the impression that the message will be conveyed word-perfect in its entirety. "Is that all?"

"It's all I can say."

There is no reply. He shuts his eyes, watches the red-black of the inside of his eyelids, listens to the great vast silence.

"Okay," he says. "I can go. I will... go."

He chooses a direction and sets his feet towards it. Pulls himself towards the horizon. After an amount of time that he is not able to estimate, engines roar behind him.

* * *

In the distance, sky. In the distance, stars. In the distance... He lets his mind flow like water over the surface of the planet, reaching out, looking for the ripples left by sentient life. Yes. In the distance, people living, quietly, nothing to do with him. He makes his way towards the closest cluster of sentience, stumbling slowly through the wilderness. He has a weapon, a weapon that knows him; he has armour, even if it doesn't fit right; he has his list of names, tucked close to his skin. What else is there to want?

He makes himself a list. The list is of Things To Do Now.

There is nothing on it.

He adds Item One: find something to put on the list.

* * *

Natare thinks she's going to be robbed when the man first comes through the door and stands, feet planted like a fighting man, in front of her workbench with a rifle and a leather bundle on his back.

He's dressed strangely, and that's coming from a woman in head-to-toe red paint and metal. He's dressed like someone who has heard of clothes before, but has never encountered them in real life; he's deduced that the purpose is to cover skin, and therefore has draped himself entirely in fabric, soft thick pile too warm for the climate here. His hands are gloved, his boots clank, and she can only see a thin sliver of his face through the wrap and coil of fabric meant for other purposes.

"Silas Damarhin," he says, in strangely-accented Mando'a. "You were his kin?"

She puts down her blowtorch; he shuffles slightly.

"I was," she says, because—

It's been so long since Galidraan. A decade at least. She knows he's gone; her sisters are already using the past tense, but she hasn't been able to yet. Not without a body.

"I could not build him a pyre," the stranger says; "But I have brought you what I could."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> would u believe that until there were already like six chapters posted i didn't realise that the title 'false dichotomy' would be read as about the dark n light side?
> 
> there is a sequel incoming! which will hopefully be lighter in tone and let me flex my worldbuilding muscles.


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